Einarson’s rise at the 2016 Scotties Tournament of Hearts is over

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/02/2016 (3871 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GRANDE PRAIRIE, Alta. — Kerri Einarson’s rise at the 2016 Scotties Tournament of Hearts is over, after a playoff victory slipped through her fingers on her final shot.

The East St. Paul skip and her Team Manitoba fell 7-5 to Northern Ontario’s Krista McCarville in the 3-vs-4 Page game on Saturday afternoon. The loss was sealed when Einarson’s 10th end hammer missed, and handed McCarville a stolen deuce

That means McCarville will face Jennifer Jones in Saturday night’s 7:30 p.m. CST semifinal. The winner of that match will move on to battle Chelsea Carey and Team Alberta in Sunday’s championship game.

Einarson will instead return to the ice and play for bronze on Sunday, where she will face the loser of the semifinal.

“We controlled the whole game,” Einarson said, blinking back the heartbreak of the loss. “I know we’ll be back, so we just got to go out there and play for the bronze, and go hard… it just wasn’t meant to be.”

It was a wrenching end for the Manitobans, who clamped down on a sprinkling of Northern Ontario mistakes to control the first half of the game.

For instance, Northern Ontario second Ashley Sippala burned McCarville’s last rock in the fourth end, which allowed Einarson to put her own shot rock back in play. After that, the Manitoba skip simply drew in for a deuce and a 3-1 lead.

They padded that figure in the fifth, where a heroic sweeping effort from Manitoba lead Kristin MacCuish helped keep her team’s shot rock safe. McCarville’s hammer draw came in wrong, allowing Manitoba to walk away with a steal of one.

At the half, Einarson was curling at 93 per cent, while McCarville was struggling at 65 per cent through her first 10 shots.

Late in the game, the tables turned completely. Einarson saw a golden chance for a seventh-end deuce melt into just a single, as her hammer rolled out the house. In the eighth, McCarville finally snagged two, and collected a stolen single in the very next end. Again, it was Einarson’s hammer throw that missed, this one flashing out.

“It kind of shows what we’ve done this whole week,” McCarville said. “We’ve been down the first half of the game in a lot of our games, and we’ve really battled back the last five. To do it again is pretty exciting.”

That left the game tied 5-5, with Manitoba holding the hammer coming home. There are worse situations to be in, but Manitoba’s hopes came undone on Einarson’s last shot — a tap for a win that came in too wide. “I thought that ice would have been okay,” Einarson said. “I needed to tighten it.”

For McCarville, the semifinal appearance — and possibly beyond — is something of a statement in her comeback season.

The Thunder Bay curler won four Ontario championships starting in 2006, and rose to claim a bronze medal on her last visit six years ago. She stepped away from the sport in 2013, citing her workload as a teacher and a mother to two young kids. But after watching last year’s Northern Ontario final in the stands, she decided to return to competitive play.

She assembled a new team with third Lilly, second Sippala and lead Sarah Potts, and they burst out of the gates with a slew of bonspiel wins. In the Scotties playdowns, they bested favourite and reigning champion Tracy Fleury three times. In Grande Prairie this week, they marched to a 7-4 round robin finish that included a win over Jones.

Now, they’ll have to find out if they can do it twice in a row. “Obviously, they’re a great team,” McCarville said. “We know we’re going to have to pull up our socks a little bit to beat them.”

 

***

 

During the second-end break of the 3-vs-4 Page game, organizers presented Saskatchewan third Ashley Howard with the 2016 Marj Mitchell Sportsmanship Award. The honour is handed out each year to the player judged to have exemplified fair play and dedication to the sport of curling.

It’s the third straight year a Saskatchewan player has won the honour. Former Stefanie Lawton third Sherry Anderson earned the title in 2014 and again last year.