Thurston on top at perfect 6-0

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This article was published 09/01/2010 (6036 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

KILLARNEY — Seven teams entered Day 3 of the Scotties Provincial Women’s Curling Championship with perfect records, all eyeing first place, all dreaming of glory.

But some of those zeroes had to go on Friday with the heavyweights facing each other and the meat of the round-robin about to unfold. And when the final stone was tossed Friday night just one squad — Jill Thurston of Deer Lodge — stood alone unbeaten at 6-0 with the final two draws set for this morning/afternoon before the playoffs begin later in the evening.

“I’m not really surprised, there’s three great curlers in front of me,” said Thurston, who won a Manitoba junior championship in 1991 with Jennifer Jones at third, Kristie Moroz (now lead for Joelle Brown) at second and Kelly Scott at lead. “We all have a lot of confidence and believe in one another. At the beginning of the week you just want to put yourself in a playoff spot.”

Thurston leads the Red Group following victories Friday over Lisa Blixhavn and Chelsea Carey, with Blixhavn — the local favourite — and Janet Harvey, both of whom split games on Friday, at 5-1. The Black Group is even tighter with three teams at 5-1 — defending champion Barb Spencer and Joelle Brown, both of Fort Rouge and East St. Paul’s Kim Link.

“We wanted to come out with at least one win today,” said Brown, supported on her new team by Tracey Lavery, Tamara Bauknecht and Moroz, prior to her loss Friday night. “We’re very happy, very pleased to be where we are today. It’s unexpected, but we just go about our game, do our own business and see where we’re at at the end of the day.

“We’re gelling together very well, but we just don’t have expectations for ourselves. We do want to play well and we know we can play well, but we don’t want to expect to win. We always want to be the underdog and that’s exactly the what we were thinking when we went into (the morning) game (an 8-5 victory over defending champion Barb Spencer). We said, ‘Barb is the favourite here, she should beat us. We have nothing to lose here, so just play hard and play our game and try to get our chances.’

“I’m enjoying it. I wish you guys hadn’t talked to me until later, though… you may have jinxed us.”

One of the day’s critical performance was a 8-4 bounce-back victory by Harvey over Morden’s Chelsea Carey, following a 10-9 loss to Blixhavn in the morning.

“Every time you come off a loss you want to come back out, shake it off and play well,” said Harvey. “I thought we did that under some tough ice conditions. We could basically play on only one half of the sheet because the other was really flat. It was a difficult game from that point of view, but we did the best with what we had and the girls played great.

“I’ve been doing this a long time. We only had to win two games and we’re in first place. That’s not that bad. You don’t like to lose but, you play hard and there’s no point in leaving anything back at the hotel. You might as well come out and play your hardest and see what happens.

“We didn’t play that bad this morning, she just played really well. She made just some peaches. There’s not much you can do about that.”

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca