Crowd goes wild following Team Nunavut victory

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This article was published 18/02/2020 (2358 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MOOSE JAW, Sask. — The happiest moment of the 2020 Scotties so far came on Tuesday morning, when a result landed on the scoreboard that, at the start of the week, nobody would have seen coming, which is what made it all such a delight. There’s nothing quite like the rush of joys unforeseen.

So when skip Lori Eddy and her Team Nunavut shook hands following their stunning 6-5 upset victory over perennial Scotties threat Krista McCarville of Northern Ontario, the crowd was elated. It was Nunavut’s second-ever win on a main Scotties Tournament of Hearts draw, though import Eddy, a 1997 women’s national curling championship finalist as Ontario third, has had more.

“I think I’m in shock,” Eddy said, wide-eyed and grinning after the win. “I can’t believe that just happened.”

What a story, what a ride, what a testament to a week speckled with the unexpected. The Nunavut team was assembled for this event; there were no other contenders. While Eddy is a veteran, the foursome features two youngsters in 20-year-old vice Sadie Pinksen and 21-year-old lead Kaitlin McDonald.

That wasn’t the only big upset on Tuesday. In the afternoon, New Brunswick’s Andrea Crawford made history when she not only handed top seed Kerri Einarson and Team Manitoba their first loss of the week, but did it by striking for the first-ever seven-ender in Scotties history; New Brunswick went on to win 13-7.

(Einarson seems to have a knack for making unusual entries in the history books: in 2015, she scored the first eight-ender in a provincial women’s championship. In 2018, she became the first-ever Wild Card skip at the Scotties. One thing’s for sure, her career has been full of adventures.)

After the game, Einarson was loose, even smiling a little. It’s a what-can-you-do situation: bad games happen, and after going 4-0 to start the week, Manitoba had put themselves in a position where they could take a stumble.

Manitoba came back that night and scored a five-ender en route to beating Saskatchewan to lock their championship round spot.

Still, what a week for some of the lower seeds who, even when their efforts haven’t shown in the standings, have been the buzz of the Scotties. It isn’t usually for a seven-ender, but there have been plenty of times this week that one of the long shots has dunked a favourite in hot water.

“Everyone here is so good,” Einarson said. “They’ve all been playing amazing. Every game, they’re playing good against us, and we know we have to be on our toes and play well.”

You’ll never catch a curler on record saying they expected an easy game. They respect each other too much for that, though when they chart out their week behind closed doors, they can be practical: it’s not a matter of disrespect, just probability. When some games are coin flips, they can’t afford to lose many where odds are in their favour.

But this year, those words of praise seem to have some extra weight behind them.

When the final story of this Scotties is written, it won’t remember much about the round robin. The third-year format, which sees half the teams eliminated after just seven games of pool play, basically guarantees that. All the attention goes to the championship round, where the final battles for playoff berths rage.

That’s a shame, because the big story of the week has been the underdogs, even when their efforts weren’t really showing up in the standings. There haven’t been many blowouts in Moose Jaw, but there has been a pile of teams pushing some of the game’s greats to their limits and, in a few memorable cases, coming out on top.

For instance, Jennifer Jones and Team Wild Card were lucky to escape their extra-end game against Prince Edward Island with a win; if veteran P.E.I. skip Suzanne Birt had been just a whisper lighter on her final draw, or her sweepers had given just a smidgen less, they would have beaten her, just like they’d already done to Rachel Homan.

Elsewhere in the round robin, a spirited young British Columbia squad, skipped by first-time Scotties competitor Corryn Brown, came out shooting against Homan’s Ontarios team when they faced her and nearly won, just one day after they’d pushed Jones to extra end in a Sunday night nailbiter.

Or consider the play of Quebec’s Noemie Verreault. She was still winless after her first five games, but on Monday she had McCarville on the run — at one point in that game, Quebec led 7-5 — and earlier in the day took defending Canadian champion Chelsea Carey right to the latter’s second-last shot.

That’s remarkable for a team that came into the Scotties with such low expectations on their shoulders. They don’t have much experience on arena ice. They play in Quebec bonspiels where the competition level is much lower. “It’s not the same,” Verreault said after a scrappy loss to Team Saskatchewan on Tuesday.

“Honestly, no pressure,” Verreault said. “We don’t play against people, we play against rocks. We play against the other colour. We can play any shot, anything. Yes, it’s a question of mindset, but we play against rocks. Not teams.”

The experience at the Scotties has been eye-opening for them. Verreault is proud of their performance, winless though it may be. What is more, she said with a vivacious pride, it made them realize they can hang with the teams they see every week on TV.

“It’s knowing that we can play in the big leagues,” Verreault said, with a teammate translating from French. “We’re going to try and get into more competitive tournaments, as we can see that we can match up against these more competitive teams.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca