Jennifer Jones headed to Scotties finals for eighth time

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This article was published 20/02/2015 (4099 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MOOSE JAW, Sask. – For the eighth time in her career, Jennifer Jones is headed to the final of the Canadian women’s curling championship.

In the Friday night 1 vs. 2 page playoff game at the 2015 Scotties Tournament of Hearts, Jones and her Team Manitoba foursome struck early and held onto the ice to eke out an 8-6 win over Alberta’s Val Sweeting. The win earned Jones, third Kaitlyn Lawes, second Jill Officer and lead Dawn McEwen a pass to Sunday afternoon’s final. 

The fact this win happened on the first anniversary of the Jones rink winning Olympic gold in Sochi did not escape her notice.

“Yes I do, and Twitter has reminded me,” the skip said after the win, when asked if she recalled what she was doing exactly one year ago. “And it was pretty spectacular, so all in all, it’s a great day for us.”

At first, it looked like it might be a cakewalk for the Manitobans — who earlier had cruised 10-5 past Sweeting in the final draw of the round robin. In just the first end, they jumped on some mistakes from Team Alberta, and turned that into a four-ender.

Was it a surprise, to score that many at the start? “Yeah, a little bit,” Jones said. “It wasn’t like they had a bad end. We made some really good shots that end, and we were fortunate to get the four. But there’s a lot of game left, and they played well, and it came down to the last rock.”

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Sweeting pushed back hard, earning a pair of stolen singles in the fourth and fifth to narrow Jones’s lead to just 4-3. After Manitoba returned from the break by taking a single, Sweeting orchestrated a deuce to tie the game up in the seventh end. But Manitoba replied with a deuce of its own in the eighth, and in the ninth end a pair of runback doubles — one from Lawes, one from Jones — evaporated Sweeting’s hopes of scoring two.

So Sweeting settled for a single, and trailed by one coming home without the hammer. Jones clinched the win with a final draw for one.

“We made some great ones, and some not-so-great ones, but we never lost control of the game,” Jones said, minutes after clinching the win with a final draw for one. “We always had control, and we had the last one coming home, which is what we wanted. So I’m really happy with that, and we’ll try to take some of that momentum through to the final on Sunday.”

Sweeting will move down to Saturday’s 3 p.m. semifinal, where she’ll play either Saskatchewan’s Stefanie Lawton or two-time defending Canadian champion Rachel Homan, who will duke it out on Saturday morning’s 3 vs. 4 page playoff game.

 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.