Einarson’s East St. Paul rink wins first-ever Scotties wild card game

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This article was published 27/01/2018 (3155 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PENTICTON, B.C. – Hours before the game, the one on which all their season hopes rested, Kerri Einarson and her teammates met for dinner. They talked about the second chance they’d been given, and how to bear the pressure.

They were nervous, they agreed. Nobody had ever earned a Scotties berth this way before, with a winner-take-all match on the eve of the tournament. So with everything on the line, third Selena Kaatz focused on the bright side.

“This is a cool game,” she remembers saying. “It’s different. Let’s go out and have some fun.'”

Well, nothing’s more fun than winning – and that’s how Team Einarson made the most of their second chance.

The East St. Paul team made a little bit of history on Friday night, surging 7-4 past former Manitoba rival Chelsea Carey to win the very first Scotties wild card game, a new last-chance match between dynamite Canadian teams.

With that, Einarson, third Selena Kaatz, second Liz Fyfe and lead Kristin MacCuish join Jennifer Jones and Team Canada’s Michelle Englot on the main draw – the three most recent Manitoba champions, in the top four seeds.

“We’re super, super excited,” Einarson said, eyes shining in the moments after the win.

Coming into the match, Einarson had a sterling recent record against Carey; she’d beaten her in all three previous meetings this season. Those games were always tight, Kaatz said, which had them in the mindset for a close fight.

Perhaps that’s what helped the Einarson rink bounce back, after a soft start.

Carey opened with a deuce; Einarson replied in the second, after a Carey miss left her an open hit for two. In fact, Team Carey was leading the shooting charts, when they blanked the third and carried hammer into the fourth end.

Then, they ran into a trouble. A few perilous Team Carey misses, and suddenly Einarson held the game in her hand.

“We just knew we need to capitalize on those misses,” Kaatz said.

Consider Einarson’s second shot of the fourth, a flawless draw to cozy up to her own shot rock on the button. Carey tried to tap those two back with her hammer, even just a few inches to score; it didn’t work, and Einarson stole two.

“It was huge,” Einarson said, of that end. “The momentum just switched right there, and we didn’t look back.”

It was as if the air wheezed out of Carey’s daunting team, which includes Cathy Overton-Clapham at third.

There was the fifth, where Team Einarson loaded the house with rocks, and a brilliant tap-and-roll by Kaatz put one on the button. Carey tried to use her hammer to dislodge it, but her attempted angle raise flashed past its first target.

So Einarson stole another point in that end, too.

“It was pretty fun,” Kaatz said, of her pivotal shot for that counter. “The crowd went insane, so that was kind of cool. And that was a turning point too, just thinking, ‘we’re making everything here, so let’s keep going.'”

Einarson stole another in the sixth, when Carey’s final draw faltered; Carey did hit the scoreboard with a deuce in the seventh, but by then it was too late. Einarson blanked the eighth, and finally ran Carey out of rocks to seal the game.

It was a heartbreaker for Carey, fresh off her first grand slam championship last weekend. She had higher hopes for her own second chance, after an upset loss in the Alberta semifinal — but that’s how curling goes, she knows.

“You lost your provincial and you still get a chance to be here, so that part is good,’’ Carey said, after the loss. “It’s a one-game event at the start of an event and you don’t know the ice or the rocks, so it’s a tough game to play.”

Meanwhile, for Einarson’s team, any celebrations will be short-lived. As the wild card team, they enter the tournament as fourth seed, in a round robin pool with number-one Jones. So there’s a lot of work to be done, to claim Canada.

Yet at least they know they’re in it. They’ve lost Scotties berths by a hair before — Einarson fell in two consecutive Manitoba finals, to Carey and Jones, before winning her first buffalo in 2016 — but this would’ve been different.

In a way, it would have stung more to go home from Penticton, to get this close, than never get here at all.

“You’re here, you get to see how excited everyone is, how amazing this atmosphere is, and you think, ‘we could be going home tomorrow,'” Kaatz said. “It was a different feeling, winning this. It would have been hard to go home.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca