Carey wins Day 1 dust-up with Jones

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This article was published 20/02/2016 (3744 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GRANDE PRAIRIE, Alta. — Lest anyone be tempted to picture this 2016 Scotties as too obvious, too straightforward, the opening draw busted out the fireworks.

It was Alberta’s Chelsea Carey who touched off the spark, soaring off the starting mark with a booming 12-5 win over defending champ Jennifer Jones.

That wasn’t the only inflated score on the first day at Revolution Place. Later, Kerri Einarson would lead Team Manitoba to a comfortable 10-2 evening win over British Columbia’s Karla Thompson. That one wasn’t quite such a head-turner, though. It never felt as if it had quite as much at stake.

Still, when the dust settled on the Carey-Jones match, both skips were calm. It’s just one game, they shrugged, with many yet to play. But what a matchup, and what a statement: defending champion Jones came into Grande Prairie as hands-down favourite, but her one-time Manitoban heir apparent is once again gunning for her crown.

That said, Carey and her inherited Calgary team of third Amy Nixon, second Jocelyn Peterman and lead Laine Peters didn’t put too much pressure on the opening draw.

“We sort of came in, saying ‘Even if (we) lose, it’s not that big a deal,’ ” Carey said, after shaking hands in the ninth end. “What we really wanted to get out of today was figuring the ice out, and feeling like we were communicating well, and doing that kind of thing.”

Mission accomplished, then. After blanking the first and settling for a second-end single, Carey swarmed Jones in the pivotal third end. Her Alberta rink studded the house with rocks and made sharp shots to keep the pressure up; Carey’s first neatly slipped through a port to pick out a lonely Team Canada yellow.

In response, Jones faltered just enough. She’d had a finely-tuned touch earlier in the day, when she won the annual Ford Hot Shots competition with a series of pretty shots. That performance earned her a new Ford Edge Sport SUV, similar to the vehicle she won in the same Scotties skills contest five years ago.

But in that third end against Carey, Jones threw just a hair off-kilter. Her first shot bumped into a guard, tapped back an Alberta rock and rolled out of the house. Her hammer throw ricocheted off its target at a decidedly unhelpful angle, and exited the rings. Those misses handed Carey a steal of four, and an early 5-0 lead.

“It was new path, and it just curled a little bit more,” Jones said later. “I probably underthrew my second one, just a little bit. But at the end of the day, we just missed by a quarter of an inch both times. So it wasn’t that bad, it just worked out really bad on the scoreboard.”

The teams traded singles for four ends, as Jones searched for offence. She finally found it in the eighth, when Carey’s attempted double only managed to dispatch one Team Canada rock. That miss also left a double open for Jones, who made no mistake with her last shot; her double cleared Alberta’s rocks out to score three.

But if there was a chance for Jones to mount a last-minute comeback, Carey shut it down fast. In the ninth end, Carey made two sleek kills to own the rings, and scored a whopping five-ender to close out the match. The result was “a kick in the butt,” Jones said, but now it’s in the past.

“If you’re going to give up a steal of four, the first game of the event’s the one to do it in,” Jones said. “I thought we played well in the second half of the game. Lots of positives to take forward. So we’re OK.”

There was a bustling crowd for the opening draw, lured by Grande Prairie’s love of curling and by the marquee match. Fans spread through the arena’s lavender seats, some decked in Carey’s signature T-shirts — “Keep Calm And Carey On” — and roared for the home turf win.

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Also in the opening draw, British Columbia’s Karla Thompson booked her ticket to the main Scotties draw with a win over Northwest Territories skip Kerry Galusha in the pre-qualification final. Thompson didn’t have much time to rest on her laurels, as she turned around to face Einarson’s rookie Team Manitoba at night.

The Manitobans had no problems handling the Thompson rink. Einarson snagged three in the second end to open an early lead then proceeded to steal one in the fifth, two in the sixth and four in the seventh en route to a 10-2 win in which she only held the hammer once.

After years of watching the Scotties on TV, Einarson admitted she had a few nerves to work out. “Now to just be here, and actually bring it into real life, it’s like whoa,” Einarson said. “When we got piped out, I got goosebumps. I felt so good.”

Jones and Einarson both play two games today, in the 9:30 a.m. CST and 7:30 p.m. draws. Jones will take on P.E.I. and Northern Ontario, while Einarson will face Nova Scotia in the morning and Ontario at night.

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.