Poise on the pebble

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This article was published 15/02/2017 (3335 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are many great shouters in curling.

Curlers with big voices that echo. Curlers who can bellow a “hard” or a “hurry hard” or even a simple “yep” with the urgency one might use if a starving grizzly was chasing the brooms.

 

Consider Chelsea Carey, former Manitoba champion and now curling queen of Canada, who can belt out sweeping instructions so loud her face turns red from the effort. Or Alberta’s Heather Nedohin, a living hurry-hard legend.

Michelle Englot, by her own admission, is not one of those full-throttle callers. That was one of the first things the veteran skip’s teammates noticed about playing with her. She was poised; she was calm; they almost couldn’t hear her.

It was in March 2016 when they learned this, at the CCT Uiseong Masters in South Korea. Two months earlier, three-fourths of the team had lost a heartbreaker in the Manitoba women’s title game to Kerri Einarson; after which skip Kristy McDonald opted to retire.

But — in a story that has become part of provincial curling lore — third Kate Cameron, second Leslie Wilson and lead Raunora Westcott still had their eye on making the Canadian Olympic trials. They just needed a skip to lead the way.

“It was like, I’m not going to play for just anyone,” Wilson says. “We need somebody who’s been there before.”

Enter Englot, a seven-time Saskatchewan champion and former rival of the late Sandra Schmirler. Cameron, Wilson and Westcott knew the Regina-based skip from the bonspiel circuit. She had “crushed us” in the 2015-16 season, Cameron says with a laugh.

When they called, Englot was intrigued. After a number of comparatively quiet years, she was keen to return to top-end play. That’s easier said than done, if you’re trying to get four women together without life getting in the way.

“I was probably at the point in my career where… well, building a team is hard,” Englot says, chatting at Winnipeg’s Granite Curling Club last weekend. “It comes down to finding people who are on the same page as you, at the same point in your life.

“With women, it’s a little bit more challenging,” she says. “There are careers and babies. I had one teammate I played with for 18 years. Then she took time off because she had triplets.”

Englot knew the Manitoba trio was eager to climb the elite curling ladder. She knew they were committed to the practise and effort. They’d done it for years; Westcott and Wilson had been a tight front end off and on since 2002.

Just a few weeks after the initial phone call, they met as a team for the first time at the Vancouver airport en route to South Korea.

The tournament was wild. They had little time to practise. The time clocks were shorter than usual, so there was little time for discussion. It was more like “speed curling,” Cameron says, just messy and impulsive and hectic.

That’s when they learned, despite her cold-burn competitive fire, the petite Englot was also oh-so-quiet.

“I’m not like that,” Cameron says. “Neither was Kristy. So we found ourselves out there like, ‘Is she even talking?’ You have to get used to someone’s voice out there. There’s six different people screaming at once… but now we got it.”

That seems to be the case. It’s all on the record now: after growing through its inaugural full season, Team Englot surged to win a roller-coaster Manitoba Scotties, overcoming perennial champion Jennifer Jones in the 1 vs. 1 Page playoff and Darcy Robertson in the final.

With that, the 53-year-old Englot clinched her eighth provincial title. She earned the right to bring a buffalo jacket back to her home in Regina, where she works as director of communications for telecom giant SaskTel.

Now, after a five-year absence, she is about to return to the Scotties Tournament of Hearts. Westcott and Wilson had their last slide on national ice in 2011 (as front end for Cathy Overton-Clapham); hotshot Cameron is making her Scotties debut.

When the national title tournament kicks off Saturday in St. Catharines, Ont., it will be the first time many Manitobans see their new provincial champion; Team Englot didn’t make it into some of the big televised events this season.

So, here are a few things to know about this team.

First: they’ve already overcome adversity. They struggled in October, at one point losing three consecutive qualifying games, but in November, they surged.

At the Grand Slam of Curling’s Tour Challenge, they collected wins over some of the top rinks in the world — Carey, two-time Scotties champ Rachel Homan, Anna Hasselborg of Sweden — and rose to the event final, where they fell to Val Sweeting.

Now, the quartet credit that as the turning point. It’s hard to pinpoint why — they sat down with a sports psychologist, which helped — but there’s no doubt November marked a shift. It was followed by an idle December, but then…

“Coming out in January, we killed it,” Westcott says, laughing, thinking of their confident Manitoba title run.

Along the way, they bonded: “It feels like we’ve played with (Englot) longer than one season,” Wilson says.

Chief among that dynamic is the growing connection between Cameron and the skip. At first glance, they seem like very different curlers: where Englot tends to stand back and quietly assess the situation, Cameron can be fiery.

But on the sheet, Cameron says, they bring out the best in each other. Besides, they’re alike in the ways that matter.

“Even though I’m old enough to be her mom, we get along really well off the ice,” Englot says. “It works really well on the ice, too. She wears her emotions on the sleeve more than I do, but our competitive fire is the same.”

Will it be enough to carry them to a Maple Leaf? With Homan back in the Scotties this year, they have their work cut out for them. But with three seasoned Scotties hands and one eager first-timer, they’ll be in the thick of the battle.

“I think carrying what works for us forward, and not getting caught up in the distractions, will be important,” Englot says. “You’ll probably lose a game you shouldn’t. I know that. We want to get rolling and be consistent.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca