No mixed feelings here

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This article was published 03/04/2016 (3764 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ONE season into a new effort to build mixed doubles curling in Canada, Jeff Stoughton has reason to be pleased with its progress.

All he had to do was look around the 32-team field at the Canadian championships in Saskatoon, which wrapped up Sunday after a four-day blitz. The group included some of the sport’s most skillful players, including Rachel Homan and Mike and Dawn McEwen — and though many have little experience with mixed doubles, they are picking it up quick.

“I thought the whole week was really good,” Stoughton said shortly after the final. “There was some fantastic shotmaking out there. The level of play was right up there with what you need to be a world champion. It was a great four days.”

Now, the pressure is starting to ramp up. On Sunday, Jocelyn Peterman and Brett Gallant captured the national title, soaring 12-8 over Laura Crocker and Gallant’s Team Brad Gushue teammate Geoff Walker in the final. That books them a ticket to the world championship in Sweden later this month.

With mixed doubles curling set to debut at the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Canada must perform well enough at the 2016 and 2017 world championships to secure an Olympic spot. It’s not necessarily a given: since the first worlds in 2008, Canada has earned one medal, a 2009 bronze; the next-best showing came last season, when Charley Thomas and Kalynn Park finished fourth.

For the most part the worlds have been dominated by Switzerland and Sweden. So part of Stoughton’s job is to secure the future of competitive Canadian mixed doubles curling, and close the gap on a European circuit that has fallen in love with the fast-paced doubles game.

So far, so good. Just eight months after he was named Curling Canada’s mixed doubles manager, Stoughton has the bones of a competitive program in place. A handful of new events popped up over the winter, whereas before there was almost nothing, and elites were buzzing: Jennifer Jones declared it one of her favourite things to do.

There are some more items to tick off. Next year, Stoughton hopes to see at least three Curling Canada-sanctioned events, and he’s encouraging curling clubs to hold more at the grassroots level. He is also hoping to snag a TV deal for future mixed doubles nationals and the potential Olympic trials — this year, the nationals were streamed on YouTube.

Stoughton is banking on the fact once Canadian fans get to watch mixed doubles games, which clock in at around a brisk 90 minutes and can feature wild momentum shifts, they’ll be jazzed to see more.

“That’s definitely the ultimate goal, to get it on TV,” he said. “To see how different it is.”

Season winding down

While the curling season is sliding to its close, there were still a few big prizes to be decided over the weekend.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t big enough for La Salle skip Randy Neufeld, who fell just short of defending his 2015 Canadian seniors championship in Nova Scotia. Neufeld and his team fell 6-3 to Ontario’s Bryan Cochrane in Saturday’s final, and flew back to Manitoba Sunday night with a silver medal.

Still, it was a resilient result, considering team second Dean Moxham was sidelined by emergency appendix surgery just hours before the competition in Digby. With Moxham sidelined, the team — which includes Peter Nicholls and Dale Michie — brought in Dale Brooks at second.

It was an unexpected twist for Brooks, who had travelled to Nova Scotia as coach of the Manitoba women’s champion Sandra Cowling rink.

On the other side of the age spectrum, curling aficionados got a look at the next generation as the Tim Hortons Youth Spring Bonspiel wrapped up at Assiniboine Curling Club over the weekend. Morris’s Hayley Bergmann and St. Vital Curling Club skip Ryan Wiebe clinched the under-16 competitive division finals.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca