Starting from rock bottom

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/12/2010 (5715 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

She earned the right to not have to play this week by winning last February’s Canadian Women’s Curling Championship.

But when Cathy Overton-Clapham was controversially fired from her job last spring as the third for Jennifer Jones, she also lost the automatic bye into this winter’s Canadian championship that went with being part of that team.

And so it is that the winningest female curler in the history of this province and a three-time defending Canadian champion finds herself in the most humbling of circumstances — starting all over again from the very bottom as one of 13 women’s teams competing in the city zone playdowns this week.

“This is what we’re going to have to do,” Overton-Clapham said Wednesday, “and that’s just the way it is.”

The winners this week — and with just one other team in her zone, Overton-Clapham will almost certainly be one of them — will advance to next month’s provincial women’s curling championship in Altona, where 16 teams will compete to become the Team Manitoba foursome that will join Jones’s Team Canada at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts in Charlottetown in February.

Karma — maybe even justice — would appear to be on Overton-Clapham’s side in this undertaking. She has been to the last six national championships in a row — and would already have her ticket booked to a seventh had Jones not dumped her for reasons that had nothing to do with her past performance.

But the game is still decided on the ice, not in a courtroom, and the rocks pay no heed to resumés or pedigree or even to the fact that Overton-Clapham’s entire new team is made up of defending champions.

There’s the skip, of course. But alongside Overton-Clapham’s three national women’s titles in the past three years, there is also the defending Manitoba junior champion in third Breanne Meakin and the defending Manitoba women’s champions (as the front end for Jill Thurston last winter) in second Leslie Wilson and lead Raunora Westcott.

Success

The fledgling team has already had success on the cash tour — making two semifinals and one final in four events — and it is small wonder they have been annointed the top seed in what is a shockingly anemic zone playdowns this year.

With just 13 teams competing for five provincials berths in Winnipeg and four rural zones having to be combined to avoid berths being handed out by acclamation, the entire concept of a 16-team women’s provincials has been rendered a mockery.

Indeed, with just one other team in Overton-Clapham’s zone — a virtual unknown in Fort Rouge’s Sherry Just — Overton-Clapham needs only win a best-of-three weekend series to capture her zone and a berth in the provincials.

In a way, you could make the case that it’s only fair that Overton-Clapham get such an easy path to the provincials in this of all years.

But nobody, least of all Overton-Clapham, is happy about a system that is making playing in a provincial championship almost as easy as buying tickets to one.

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“With the entry numbers so low,” Overton-Clapham says, “maybe it’s time we looked at making it a 10-team provincials.”

Even 10 teams might be generous at this point. But whatever the number, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t think Overton-Clapham hasn’t earned the right to be one of them this winter.

It is, in addition to everything else, only fair.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca