Watch out for Mackenzie Zacharias

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This article was published 03/12/2021 (1688 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A young local girl is beginning to make a name for herself in the world of curling.

Mackenzie Zacharias is a 22-year-old who hails from Altona but moved into the city four years ago when she enrolled at the University of Manitoba, where she’s now in her final year as a kinesiology student.

She is currently doing a practicum session at the Reh-Fit Centre on Taylor Avenue and should graduate next spring.  She plans on earning her Candian Society for Exercise Physiology (CSEP) designation. Then she hopes to find work in the field.

However, Mackenzie takes quite a bit of time off to curl and she’s very successful.

She skips her own team on the World Curling Tour and, after winning the Manitoba junior championship for two consecutive years, in 2019 and 2020, her Manitoba rink won the gold medal at the 2020 last year’s Canadian junior curling championships by going undefeated with an 11-0 record. They followed up by beating South Korea and winning the World junior curling championships in Krasnoyarsk, Russia.

Her parents were recreational curlers and now her father, Sheldon, coaches her team which includes her younger sister Emily as well as Karlee Burgess and Lauren Lenentine.

At the end of October, they were in Liverpool N.S. for the Canadian Olympic pre-trials where she defeated hometown favorite Jill Brothers with her final rock of the 10th end to break a 3-3 deadlock.

Unfortunately, they weren’t quite able to advance to the final Olympic curling trials, held last week in Saskatoon

When she’s not curling or working out at the Reh-Fit Centre, Mackenzie is a keen kick boxer and even teaches the sport.

While she and her teammates may not be going to the Olympics this time, they are all the in their early 20s and have yet to peak.

 When they do, watch out. They are already world champions and I’m sure we’ll be hearing far more from Mackenzie Zacharias and her team in the future.

☐ ☐ ☐

This is Trevor Smith’s last column for The Sou’Wester. He wrote this before he died suddenly on Nov. 12, 2021. I hope you enjoyed reading them as much as he enjoyed writing them. He was, after all, an award-winning journalist, as he was fond of telling me.

Lovingly,

His wife Joan.

Trevor Smith was a community correspondent for River Heights.