Fleury team tenacious in uphill battle at Scotties

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This article was published 17/02/2019 (2720 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SYDNEY, N.S. — After the morning loss, Tracy Fleury lingered on the floor of the arena for what — to waiting reporters — felt like forever. It wasn’t that she was avoiding them. It’s that her husband had finally made it to Sydney after travel snafus, and in that moment, all the Team Manitoba skip wanted to do was see him.

That bit of comfort came at exactly the right time. After being upset by British Columbia, Fleury — a reliably calm and positive presence, on the ice — was frustrated, visibly. The loss had set her back to a 0-2 start, and in a field like the 2019 Scotties Tournament of Hearts, that’s already a deep hole to climb out of.

But this Manitoba team is tenacious, and they are trying, and they have already begun to climb. They held a team meeting on Sunday, to talk about what wasn’t working: their strategy, their ice-reading. Then they returned to the arena at night to pick up their first victory of the tournament, a 6-3 decision over Team Quebec (0-3).

To be honest, though the Manitobans played well, the win was a bit of a gimme — at just 20 years old, Quebec’s Gabrielle Lavoie is the youngest skip here, and inexperienced. Still, and any win after a tough start is always a confidence-booster, and this one came right when Fleury’s team needed it most.

“It gives us a little bit of momentum,” Fleury said. “We still have a little bit of improving and learning to do, but we’re getting there.”

There’s no way around it: just two games in to the 2019 Scotties Tournament of Hearts, Team Manitoba is in trouble. The East St. Paul foursome’s opening-day loss to Alberta’s Chelsea Carey stung — it was a last-minute heartbreaker — but it was at least a loss that could easily figure into any playoff calculation.

But the Sunday morning loss is a problem. That’s no disrespect to British Columbia skip Sarah Wark, a first-time national competitor. It’s just that Fleury is ranked fifth in the country; Wark, who has comparatively little experience around elite-level play, is 24th. The probability was in Manitoba’s favour.

And Wark, who also surprised Nova Scotia’s Jill Brothers this week, is off to a strong 3-0 start, a fantastic story at this Scotties that is still playing out. But in an already tough pool, that’s a dangerous place for Fleury. Just two days into the competition, her back is now against the wall here in Sydney.

No matter how you slice it, there are games teams can more afford to lose, and ones they can’t. Before the round robin is over, Fleury will have to face Rachel Homan, the dominant Ontario champion, and her former Northern Ontario rival Krista McCarville, one of the sharpest curlers in this field.

Only the top four finishers in the eight-team pool will advance to the championship round. If Manitoba can make it there, they will have to face the top four finishers from the other pool, which will, let’s be honest here, likely include another daunting opponent in Canadian champ Jennifer Jones.

In other words, to have a shot at making playoffs, Manitoba almost has to win out the rest of the week, and do it against some of the toughest competition the sport could possibly throw at them. They can probably lose one more along the way, and still have a decent shot at making playoffs; two at the most, although that’s iffy.

But Fleury has travelled this road before. Last year, when she was clad in the green and yellow Northern Ontario jacket, she opened with two tough losses. She rallied to win out the round robin, beating Jennifer Jones and Kerri Einarson along the way, and eventually made the 3-vs-4 Page playoff game.

So she knows what works for her, to shake it off and move on. In the end, it’s really pretty simple.

“You just gotta forget about the bad games, the bad shots, and just kind of take each game as a separate game,” Fleury says. “Still learn about your mistakes of the past, without dwelling on them… We’re definitely not giving up. There’s still a lot of curling left to do.”

For now, they have a little time to breathe. Manitoba only plays one draw on Monday, an afternoon match against Nova Scotia’s Brothers. Still, they will have to be wary: Brothers is 0-3 after her own rough start, being upset by Wark and immediately crashing into Alberta and Ontario. She’ll be hungry for a win, for this home-province crowd.

•••

Elsewhere in the maple leaf hopes for Manitobans, Jennifer Jones picked up another win in her lone Sunday draw.

Jones and Team Canada rose 7-4 over Northwest Territories veteran Kerry Galusha, though the game was much tighter than the score suggested. In fact, it was a delightfully entertaining match, marked by some stellar shots by both skips; it only broke open when Jones laid down a three-spot in the ninth end.

That’s not uncommon, for Scotties matches between Jones and Galusha. For whatever reason, their teams always have entertaining clashes when they meet.

“They’re a really good team, and make a ton of shots,” Jones said, after the win. “We felt a little bit more comfortable with the ice, so hopefully we’ll just build on that. It’s always great to have good games, especially when they go your way. So we’re happy with that, but we’ll try to be a little bit sharper.”

Jones, now 2-0 on the week, will be back with two games on Monday, as the round robin hits its stride. In the 7:30 a.m. CDT draw, she will take on Prince Edward Island veteran skip Suzanne Birt, and follow it by facing against New Brunswick in the 5:30 p.m. draw.

This week will see the return of a fan favourite. Jones confirmed that longtime former second Jill Officer, who retired at the end of last season and is along for the ride here as alternate, will figure into a game soon. The skip declined to specify which one: “I don’t want to ruin the surprise,” she said, with a laugh.

•••

It was the six-ender that never was, and now, Newfoundland’s Kelli Sharpe will never forget it.

Call it one of the strangest chapters in the week thus far. It came on the last shot of the fourth, in the Sunday match between Yukon and Newfoundland. Sharpe was holding hammer. With five of her red rocks studding the house, and just one lonely yellow waiting to be knocked out, the call was easy: a wide-open nose hit to score six.

Well, to the astonishment of everyone watching in the arena and live on TSN, Sharpe elected to draw.

Her shot didn’t work out —the hammer crashed into a guard — and Newfoundland scored only three. Luckily, they never had to regret not calling the hit — they wound up winning the game by a comfortable 12-4 margin — but still, after the game, all Sharpe could do was shake her head and laugh at what happened.

To be clear: there’s no doubt that Sharpe does know better. She’s a veteran curler, 25 years experience, and this is her seventh national appearance, though first as a skip. (Previously, she’d competed here playing second for Northwest Territories icon Kerry Galusha, and as third for Newfoundland’s Heather Strong.)

So it was a “brain-dead moment,” she said. They realized it as soon as it happened. It’s just that they’d been so focused on planning the hammer shot, that when Yukon skip Nicole Baldwin’s last shot opened up the possibility of the hit, the Newfoundland team kept forging ahead with their plan, locked on mental railroad tracks.

“We stood up, and we were like, ‘oh, there was a hit for six there,'” Sharpe said. “Anyways, part of the experience. You’re going to have a brain-dead moment every now and then… shake it off, keep playing and focus on the next rocks, that’s all we had to do. We were a little angry.”

The skip did a have a few words with coach Leslie Ann Walsh, about trying to get their attention before future brain-dead moments happen — “I said, ‘jump up and down, do something,” Sharpe said, with a chuckle — but for now, they’ll just chalk this one up to a funny story to tell, down the road.

“This is a new experience for me,” she said. “I usually see everything, and that was just stupid.”

•••

Finally — and this is more of an aside — it’s too bad, sometimes, that the spotlight falls so heavily on Homan.

For instance, it wasn’t a surprise that Homan’s Sunday night match against Nova Scotia was chosen for the TSN feature sheet. After all, the Ontario champion is the biggest star in the sport right now, and its most dominant force: where she plays, TV cameras tend to follow.

Yet while Homan and her Ottawa team were comfortably shooting circles around their opponents — they won 6-3 — a much more interesting game was playing out just two sheets over, where Alberta’s Chelsea Carey was locked in a battle with Northern Ontario’s McCarville.

Carey eked out the 7-6 win, and rose to 3-0 on the week; McCarville slipped to 1-2. It was a match that could have significant playoff ramifications. Too bad folks watching at home didn’t get to see it.

The 2019 Scotties Tournament of Hearts rolls on through Feb. 24, with playoffs set to begin Saturday.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca