Carey acquits herself quite nicely as fill-in for Fleury

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This article was published 28/02/2021 (1918 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CHELSEA Carey’s term position with a curling team from Manitoba is up.

The 36-year-old skip filled in admirably for Tracy Fleury at the Scotties championship, guiding it to a 6-6 record after Saturday’s final championship-round draw.

The team from East St. Paul, competing as Wild Card 1, missed the playoffs.

Carey, with third Selena Njegovan, second Liz Fyfe and lead Kristin MacCuish, dropped 9-4 decision to Alberta’s Laura Walker in Saturday’s evening draw. The team was officially eliminated earlier in the day, despite posting a 6-5 win over Winnipeg’s Beth Peterson (Wild Card 3).

Carey, a former Winnipegger and two-time Canadian champion representing Alberta stepped in to replace Fleury, who stayed home in Sudbury, Ont., to care for her eight-month-old daughter, Nina, who has a medical condition.

“I was really grateful for the opportunity to play with these girls. Obviously, they’re a great team and, honestly, just a lot of fun,” said Carey. “This week, the results were, obviously, not what we wanted but it’s the most fun I’ve had curling in a long time. So, it’s been a great week.”

Fleury’s crew, ranked second on the Canadian Team Ranking System, came in last weekend as the Scotties’ No. 2 seed behind Gimli’s Kerri Einarson (Team Canada), the defending champions.

The team burst out with victories over Nunavut’s Lori Eddy, Manitoba’s Jennifer Jones and New Brunswick’s Melissa Adams but lost three of its next five — including two by a single point. Yet, they slipped into the “final eight” with a record of 5-3.

“We’ve been telling her all week she’s been playing with a lot of confidence and I think that helped us going into games, having not practised together and having not had ice,” said MacCuish. “She really gave us confidence out there.”

However, back-to-back defeats to a pair of Scotties favourites, Canada and Ontario, on Friday sealed their fate. Ottawa skip Rachel Homan scored a deuce and then stole one in the 10th.

“We felt like we were playing a lot better than the results we were getting, unfortunately. Sometimes, that happens,” said Carey. “There’s luck and fate in events like this and, unfortunately, it just wasn’t on our side this week.”

Impressively, Carey was tied with Alberta’s Laura Walker for the fourth-best shooting percentage (78) among skips in the 18-team field, prior to Saturday’s late draw. She was even with Alberta’s Laura Walker and behind only Einarson (82), Homan (81) and Jones (79).

The daughter of former Brier champion Dan Carey claimed a provincial women’s title in 2014 playing out of Fort Rouge. She moved to Calgary in time for the 2015-16 season and immediately found success, winning a pair of Alberta and Canadian crowns (2016, 2019) with two different teams.

But her team split last March, and when she wasn’t aligned with any other Scotties competitors the Fleury contingent reached out.

They spent a lot of time in virtual meetings and phone calls but didn’t hit the ice together until a day before the Scotties began inside a competitive bubble — owing to the COVID-19 pandemic — at Markin MacPhail Center.

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But they seemed to click immediately, Carey said.

“No one’s been able to practise very much but I thought that part went really well. Sometimes, it just doesn’t go your way. We were throwing a lot of really good rocks that were really close, and a couple of games we ran into really hot skips when we played well,” she said. “It was kind of one of those weeks.”

jason.bell@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @WFPJasonBell