Team Jones soaked up lessons from defeat in the Caribbean
OTTAWA Last January was the low point of the Olympic quadrennial for 2014 gold-medallist Jennifer Jones and her team from Winnipeg.
It was the final day of the Manitoba women’s curling championship and, as usual, Jones was in the mix to win it all.
Then something strange happened.
Jones lost to fellow Winnipegger Darcy Robertson in the semifinal and the Olympic champ was bounced from the national women’s championship before it even began. Jones is a five-time Canadian champion who has competed in the Scotties Tournament of Hearts 12 times. The surprising loss made for an unusual winter.
Jones, third Kaitlyn Lawes, second Jill Officer and lead Dawn McEwen didn’t wait long to try to figure out what went wrong.
“Immediately after, we all went to my house and we had a meeting that lasted about two hours,” Lawes said Sunday at the Olympic curling trials in Ottawa. “It was, ‘OK, what is our plan going forward? Obviously what we’re doing isn’t working right now and we need to try and change that.’”
Their next step was to take a team vacation to the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean. They were there as Michelle Englot was representing Manitoba at the national Scotties in St. Catharines, Ont.
“We got some sun and relaxed and created a bit of a plan for the next 18 months,” Lawes said. “We came back feeling completely refreshed. We set a goal of wanting to win the Players Championship because that was our next event and we ended up succeeding in that. It was a good way to end the season with some confidence after we had two months off.”
The Jones team carried that success into this season and has been on a roll since. They’ve already won two Grand Slam events and are looking like favourites to get back to the Olympics, slated for PyeongChang, South Korea, in February.
“Last year we didn’t make the Scotties, but we are a team that really learns from our experiences and we took that as an opportunity to take time to train and to try to tweak a few things and I think that really created that spark and fire for us again and we’ve started to get back on a bit of a roll,” Lawes said.