National Post (National Edition)
Red-hot P.E.I. scoring at record clip
Unheard-of 28 points in two games at Scotties
In the last two games, at the highest level of Canadian women’s curling, Team Prince Edward Island has scored 28 points.
This is not a misprint.
The P.E.I. team, skipped by Suzanne Birt, edged New Brunswick 13-12 on Tuesday afternoon in the highest scoring game in Scotties Tournament of Hearts history.
Then P.E.I. followed that up with a 15-5 win over Northwest Territories on Wednesday morning.
The 15 points tied a Scotties record and their steal of six points in the eighth end also tied a tournament record.
You’d have to think this has something to do with the implementation of the five-rock freeguard zone at the Scotties for the first time this year. It leads to far more rocks in play than there used to be and more big ends.
“I don’t know if it’s the fiverock rule or if we’re keeping the pressure on and getting rocks in good spots,” said Birt, whose team booked a spot in the championship round by improving its record to 5-1.
“It’s fun scoring lots of points.” The P.E.I. team, which also includes third Marie Christianson, second Meghan Hughes and lead Michelle Mcquaid, came into the event with a goal of making the championship round and will now have to re-set its sights.
“We have as good a shot as anybody and a few good games in the championship pool will give us a really good shot at making the playoffs for sure,” Birt said.
Birt is no stranger to Scotties success, but it has been a while.
Back in 2003 her Charlottetown team won a bronze medal after putting together a 10-3 record. Since then though, in eight appearances prior to this year, Birt barely got a sniff of the playoffs.
She believes the successes and failures have prepared her well for what she’ll go through the rest of this week.
“Back in 2003, at 20 or 21 you are a bit naive or something,” she said. “There was no real pressure and we just kind of went with the flow. Now you’re mature, you’ve got families, you know how to put things in perspective.”
P.E.I. and Team Wild Card (Casey Scheidegger) are the only two teams to have guaranteed themselves spots in the championship round through Pool B with 5-1 records.
Team Canada (Jennifer Jones) and Saskatchewan (Robyn Silvernagle) had 4-2 records going into Wednesday night games at Centre 200.
Jones, who beat Newfoundland 8-4 Wednesday morning, and Silvernagle, who beat Yukon 6-4, needed wins Wednesday night to punch their tickets to the championship round.
Northwest Territories (Kerry Galusha) 3-3 needed a win over Yukon on Wednesday night and a loss by either Canada or Saskatchewan to get into a tiebreaker.
ONTARIO BACK IN FORM
Rachel Homan’s Ontario foursome booked a spot in the championship round Wednesday afternoon with an 8-6 win over British Columbia (Sarah Wark).
It was a nice bounce-back for Homan, who lost twice on Tuesday and was in danger of falling into a tiebreaker with another mis-step.
Ontario finished pool play at 5-2, tied with Northern Ontario (Krista Mccarville) for second place in Pool A.
Chelsea Carey’s Alberta rink ran the table to finish at 7-0 and will start championship-round play all alone in first place.
“It’s good to be moving on to the second round without having to go through tiebreakers,” Homan said. “That was pretty import- ant for us. It’s a job well done this week so far.
“We talked a bit about what was going right and what was going wrong (Tuesday night). We had a couple glasses of wine — not me, but a couple people (Homan is pregnant) — and just shook it off. Everyone has their off days and we knew we’d come back strong.”
Mccarville beat Manitoba’s Tracy Fleury 7-5 to lock up a spot in the championship round. Manitoba’s loss dropped the Fleury foursome (4-3) into a tiebreaker on Thursday morning against B.C.
“Just knowing that we’re avoiding the tiebreaker always helps,” Mccarville said.
“Because we don’t want to be in a situation of possibly playing three games and just a very highstress day. We can kind of relax (Wednesday night) knowing we’re in the championship round now.”
Fleury and Wark were looking at the bright side of still having an opportunity to keep playing.
“Happy to still be alive with three losses, so that’s the positive take-away,” Fleury said.
“We’re playing good and we’re feeling OK about Thursday.”
Wark, a Scotties rookie, said if anyone had told her and her teammates at the beginning of the week that they’d be in a tiebreaker, they’d have taken it.
“We would have been thrilled, absolutely,” Wark said.
“Unfortunately we missed a few against Ontario and if you miss a few against a big team like that, they aren’t super nice about it … and then they get four.
“That’s hard to come back from but we said at the fifth-end break that we wanted to look at the last five ends as good practice.”