B.C. skip soaking up the Scotties dream

Wark rink making noise at nationals

For a glimpse into the personality and spirit of Sarah Wark, all you need to do is look at her team’s unofficial logo, which was designed after a discount beer label.

After Wark and her Abbotsford teammates won the British Columbia women’s curling championship in Quesnel on Feb. 3, some of her friends went to work immediately on designing an “original Wark team” logo to be worn on T-shirts in and around Centre 200 for the Scotties Tournament of Hearts.

“The greatest T-shirts ever,” Wark said. “Lucky Lager is my absolute favourite beer. I’m known to drink Lucky after a game.”

Wark and her teammates Kristen Pilote, Carley Sandwith and Jen Rusnell loved the shirts immediately and so did many other people in the Abbotsford-chilliwack area.

It wound up becoming a fundraiser for the team through Instagram.

“It’s pretty cool and everybody at home is having a lot of fun with it,” Wark said. “And everybody that came to watch got them shipped out here, so they’re all wearing the Lucky Lager Wark shirts.”

The shirts and logos have been noticeable on fans and curlers during the Canadian women’s curling championship this week and the Wark team has been pretty noticeable on the ice as well.

With a rookie skip and three other players who have only been to one previous Scotties, the B.C. team was not among the early favourites this year.

However, they jumped out to a 3-0 record before finishing pool play at 4-3, which put them into a tiebreaker Thursday morning against Manitoba’s Tracy Fleury.

B.C. won that game 8-5 and moved on to the championship round that started Thursday afternoon. Wark won again in the first championship round draw, stealing a point in the 10th to top Prince Edward Island (Suzanne Birt) 9-8 and improving to 5-3.

“There’s a huge task ahead, but this win is huge for us,” Wark said after the tiebreaker. “If you would have told us at the beginning of the week that we would have been playing a tiebreaker to get into the championship round, we would have been thrilled.”

Wark, who turned 33 earlier this week, came to the Scotties with the several goals — enjoy herself, soak up the experience and become a better curler.

Any success that comes with that is gravy at this point.

“One of our coaches back home sent us a message saying ‘Just go out there and make sure you’re having fun,’ ” Wark said. “Make sure you’re not putting all of that pressure on yourself because you might not remember the moments. We’re trying to take everything in and perform at the same time.”

In a field that includes former Canadian champions Rachel Homan, Jennifer Jones and Chelsea Carey, Wark and her teammates are unknowns.

They rarely played any of the other teams in the Scotties before this week and that made it hard for them to predict how they might fare here on Cape Breton Island.

“When you come into a field that you haven’t played against, you don’t know how you’re gonna stack up,” Wark said.

“We didn’t want to put that pressure on ourselves and say we needed to make that championship round.

“We didn’t know what to expect. We came for good games and good practice for the years to come.

“Now that we have shown up and played some good games and we feel like we fit in, it’s a great feeling.”

That’s the thing about Wark. She doesn’t want to be a Scotties afterthought.

“My mindset coming in was I don’t want this to be a one-time thing,” she said.

“I don’t want to go to the Scotties once and just enjoy myself. I want to enjoy myself, get the experience, take it all in and live the Scotties dream, but I do want to take this as a really good practice so we can have a better year next year.”

One thing she has really embraced is playing in the arena atmosphere, under the bright television lights, with the pressure on for every call and every shot.

“I love it,” she said.

“It’s nice to go in, feeling the crowd and the emotions and being on the camera and everything like that, it drives me a little bit. It brings out a nice level of confidence that I don’t always have.”

WE FEEL LIKE WE FIT IN, IT’S A GREAT FEELING.