Mead and Stoughton have short-term goal… a world title

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This article was published 08/07/2010 (5893 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jon Mead says he no longer has Olympic aspirations. At least not for the moment.

Winnipeg’s Mead, a former Brier champion, has hooked up once again for next season with his former skip, Jeff Stoughton.

That back-end combination won a Brier in 1999 and came within a 10th end of winning the Canadian Curling Trials in 2005.

And so with those two men back together for next season — along with former junior champion Reid Carruthers at second and longtime Stoughton lead Steve Gould rounding out the team — it begs the question whether Mead once again has the 2014 Winter Olympics in his sights.

"I have no Olympic aspirations right now," says Mead. "We’ll give this a try for the year and the only curling goal we have right now is to get back to the Brier and win a World Championship.

"We just want to be competitive and have some fun."

Mead "retired" after the soul-crushing loss to Newfoundland’s Brad Gushue in the final of the 2005 Trials propelled Gushue to Olympic gold in Turin and left Mead and company watching at home on TV.

But the retirement was short-lived and Mead spent much of the past three winters curling on a long-distance foursome with Ontario’s Wayne Middaugh on the cash spiel circuit.

Mead says his seven-year-old daughter Sophie — he also has a nine-month-old daughter, Charlotte — inherited the curling bug from her father. Part of Mead’s motivation for reuniting with Stoughton, he says, is so he can play closer to home and his daughter can see what her father once did better than almost anyone else in the world.

"She was three-years-old when we curled at the Trials," says Mead. "Getting her to watch 10 or 15 minutes of curling back then was like pulling teeth," he says.

"But now, when I’m away curling, she’s tracking scores on the Internet… This is a way of playing closer to home."

Overton-Clapham the mentor

 

FIRST, she took them to school in the 2010 Canadian women’s curling final.

And now Cathy Overton-Clapham will be taking P.E.I.’s Erin Carmody and Geri-Lynn Ramsay to school again.

The difference this time is the teacher and students will be on the same team.

As Overton-Clapham continues to put her hall of fame curling career back together after being abruptly punted in April from the Jennifer Jones squad she helped lead to the last three straight Canadian women’s championships, it seems ‘mentor’ is one of the new roles she is going to be taking on.

Overton-Clapham has been hired by the Canadian Curling Association to help lead a highly successful mentorship program, La Releve, which the CCA runs as part of its development programs aimed at grooming younger curlers.

Overton-Clapham has been retained to work with the Eastern Canadian wing of the program and has been assigned specifically to work with Carmody and Ramsay, who led P.E.I. to their first ever appearance in a Canadian women’s curling final in Sault Ste. Marie last winter before their Cinderella story was finally derailed with a 7-6 extra end loss to Jones and Overton-Clapham in the final.

Carmody, 22, threw skip rocks for the foursome while Ramsay, 21, was the third. Overton-Clapham, 40, says she will work with the pair, as well as New Brunswick skip Andrea Kelly.

"I’ll be working with them doing all sorts of stuff this winter," Overton-Clapham says. "And we’ll play in at least one bonspiel together at some point this winter."

Jones and Team Canada second Jill Officer are just two of over a dozen graduates of the La Releve program who have gone on to win national and world championships over the years.

In addition to curling with youngsters this winter, Overton-Clapham says she also has an invitation to curl in place of two-time Olympic gold medallist Anette Norberg at the SouthWest Ontario’s Women’s Charity Spiel in London this fall. Norberg has hooked up with a new Swedish team this winter and is unable to attend the spiel.

And finally, Overton-Clapham is putting together a team to compete in the Manitoba playdowns this winter. "I’m still working out the details but you can say I will have a team in the playdowns," she says.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca