Team Jones has put in the miles to be sufficiently battle-tested for big events

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This article was published 20/03/2015 (4199 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SAPPORO, Japan — All these years later, Jennifer Jones still remembers her first overseas adventure, a wide-eyed Swiss caper in search of a certain charm.

It was 1994 and Jones, a freshly minted Canadian junior champion, was playing at a cashspiel in Bern, Switzerland. She was all of 19 years old, a fine age to brave the wider world alone, so different than the rugged trailer road trips her family had always taken.

The elegant buildings of old Europe, the winding narrow roads, all of it conspired to make her feel so far from home. But Sandra Schmirler’s team was there and the Saskatchewan curling legend took the Manitobans under her wing.

“(Schmirler’s team) had this curling-rock jewelry and it was from a place called Thun, and I wanted it, so badly,” Jones recalled Friday morning in the café of her Sapporo hotel. “I was like, ‘This is my trip, we’re going to go.’ “

So with that, the teen curler and one of her teammates loaded onto a train to Thun, soaking in the journey, searching for a tiny jewelry shop in a place that, at the time, felt so foreign. They almost gave up the hunt, until suddenly the place came into view.

Twenty-one years later, Jones still has that curling-rock necklace, and a much longer list of travel stories, too.

No, she said, growing up she never would have guessed curling would take her from Winnipeg to China, to Europe, to a little seaside city called Sochi along the edge of the Caucasus.

She never would have guessed she, longtime comrade-in-rocks Jill Officer, lead Dawn McEwen and third Kaitlyn Lawes would one day be sitting in Sapporo, preparing to enter the 1 vs. 2 Page playoff at the world championships.

This is almost routine now for an elite curler in this era of the sport. These are the demands of the job in a post-Olympic inclusion world. This is life. It’s Team Jones’ third trip to Japan. They were in Beijing last year and went to the worlds in South Korea in 2009.

“With all the big events mostly being in Canada, it never really crosses your mind,” Jones said. “Now with the Olympics, it’s been amazing… I know South Korea had really wanted the world championships in 2009, because they were bidding on the Olympics. They were trying to showcase they can do sports they don’t traditionally do.”

The travel, it changes everything. It gifts you with an ability to let the little things just… roll. That’s a conscious decision too, Jones said, one she made after her first trip to a world championship in Paisley, Scotland in 2005.

That championship was infamously difficult, marred by a slew of organizing missteps and rough ice conditions. The Jones team, more familiar with the well-trodden curling paths of Canada, fell out in the 3 vs. 4 game. In the wake of the disappointment, though, they realized that it may be the team that had to change.

“(Those worlds) were a little bit of a disaster — minor understatement,” Jones said. “We did not handle it very well. After that, it’s like, we need to get over to Europe. We need to experience when events don’t go the way we expect them to go. Ever since then, we’ve tried to do one trip to Europe every year.”

Clearly, given Jones’ career trajectory, the adjustment worked. Over time and long distance, Jones and her team have grown more adventurous but also more able to leave the curling on the sheet.

They’ve learned to stagger their travel so as not to get bogged down with jet lag. They’ve learned to go with the flow.

“I find that when we’re travelling, it’s all about taking that breath,” Jones said.

“That’s one of the reasons I believe we did so well in Sochi. We went over there excited to experience a life experience. Even though people were telling us that it was going to be difficult… we went in with this mindset that no matter what, we were going to have a life experience that we’ll never forget, and not a day is going to pass that we’re not going to appreciate being here.”

Still, some parts of the heart don’t always follow. Although Jones’ daughter Isabella is just over two years old, the skip estimates she’s already been on more than 120 flights — more than Jones’ own parents, the skip grinned.

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The toddler stayed home this time around and the distances involved are longer than her growing mind can grasp. (“Are you comin’ today to pick me up?” Isabella asked her mom over Skype earlier this week.)

Still, Isabella already knows the drill. She recently announced plans to hop a plane and visit her mom in Japan. Consider that a snapshot of a future globetrotting Canadian curler, perhaps — or however she absorbs the lesson of her world-travelling mother.

“It’s hard to be away from her, but I just want her to live her life to experience every moment,” Jones said. “If I was to go away and be sad, it would be not what I’d want her to do. So I’ve always said, if I’m going to go away, and I’m going to compete, then I want to enjoy it, and I want to do my best. And show her that you can chase your dreams, and be a good mom, and be a good partner, and be a good person, and enjoy it.

“When I go away and I’m on the ice, I’m OK with it. I feel like it makes me more well-rounded and balanced, and I’m hoping one day when she looks back she’ll know that she was a part of it.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Every piece of reporting Melissa produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.