Team Alberta topples Team Canada at Scotties

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This article was published 26/02/2016 (3738 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GRANDE PRAIRIE, Alta. — Hard to believe lately, but it was just a few years ago that people said Jennifer Jones was a roadblock out of Manitoba for Chelsea Carey.

Not anymore. Whether you credit Carey’s savvy new team, her new provincial banner, or her growth as a curler, the reigning Alberta champ suddenly has Jones’ number.

The number that matters this time: 7-5, the final score in Friday night’s 1-vs-2 Page game, billed as a yet another battle of former Manitoba champions at this Scotties. Lifted by that number, Carey and her crew of third Amy Nixon, second Jocelyn Peterman and lead Laine Peters soared straight into the championship final.

Now, they will await the outcome of Saturday’s semifinal, to learn if they’ll have to face Jones for a third time in Grande Prairie. For Jones, her quest to defend her Canadian title will now continue through the semi, where she will face either Manitoba’s Kerri Einarson or Northern Ontario’s Krista McCarville.

It’s been a dream run for Carey at her second Scotties, and in the 1-vs-2 Page she was nearly perfect. (When she wasn’t, it was too late for Jones to build much on it.) They’d met nearly a week before in the opening draw of the round robin, and that time Carey ran away with the game 12-5 on a pair of bombshell ends.

This time, with a bye to the final on the line, Carey and Jones played it tight. But if both skips brought out their chisels, only Carey managed to chip much away.

By virtue of the round robin win, Carey held first hammer. She wielded it for a first-end deuce, with her last draw stopping not a centimetre too deep for a 2-0 lead. Jones found just a single in response, and Carey blanked the third end to carry the last rock on.

From the start, Carey threw sharp, where some of Jones’ shots wobbled off. In the fourth end, Jones lost her try at a force, when her hit-and-roll slid all the way out; Carey gladly snagged another blank. In the fifth, she yanked the game away by collecting another deuce, and taking a 4-1 lead into the break.

The crowd roared, the sold-out buzz beginning to mount. (Even Saskatoon rockers The Sheepdogs were in the house, before playing a show at a BBQ bar next door later that night.) As they did, Carey turned her face up to the stands, and smiled: at 98 per cent shooting through the first half, she had every reason to be proud.

After the break, they continued mostly the same. Alberta snagged a steal of one in the sixth, held Team Canada to a lonely point in the seventh. In the eighth, with hammer, Carey threw a heater runback double, that snagged her a deuce and bumped the lead up to 7-2.

Only in the ninth, did Carey really stumble: her last shot flubbed, leaving Jones a little tap for three to claw back Carey’s lead. It was the first big break that Team Canada got. But it also came too late: after Carey’s first shot of the 10th wiped two Canada reds from the house, Jones offered her hand.

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In Carey’s first trip to the Scotties, as Manitoba champion in 2014, she wound up falling just a hair short to Alberta’s Val Sweeting in the semifinal, and settled for a bronze. Now, she will leave with either a silver, or a chance to wear the maple leaf at the world championships in Swift Current, Sask. next month.

In the middle of the game, the entire Jones team was announced as the 2016 Scotties’ first-team all-stars. (The selection is based entirely on shotmaking percentage: all of Jones, Kaitlyn Lawes, Jill Officer and Dawn McEwen finished sharpest overall in the competition.)

That sets the stage for a big day of action on Saturday. At 2:30 p.m. CST, Einarson and McCarville will meet in the 3-vs-4 Page playoff game. Since Manitoba beat Northern Ontario in the round robin and finished in third place, Einarson will have hammer and choice of rocks in that Page game.

The winner of that match will move on to face Jones in the 7:30 p.m. CST semifinal. Both games will be broadcast live on one of the TSN channels.

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.