No easy fix for residency issues
Rule makers looking to strike a balance, but it will be hard to make everyone happy
As hard as Curling Canada and its stakeholders have tried over the years to tweak residency rules in order to strike a balance between the needs of high-performance athletes and traditions, for some it’s simply not enough.
At the Scotties Tournament of Hearts, there has been abundant conversation about the country’s residency rules, which work to protect the integrity of inter-provincial playdowns, but also limit teams in their quests to become world and Olympic champions.
The residency rules allow teams to have one out-of-province player in their lineup as they go through provincial playdowns and inter-provincial events like the Scotties and the Brier. There are also exceptions for students, which at least one high-profile team — the Ontario foursome skipped by Rachel Homan — has taken advantage of this season.
There are many elite curlers who believe those rules should be further relaxed to allow them to form the best possible teams, in hopes of representing the country and winning international medals.
Realistically, when you are looking to mine gold at the worlds every year and the Olympics every four years, does it make sense to force good teams to split up just because one or two members of the team moved to a different province?
Not really, but how do you fix it?
“I think we do have to dare to try something new,” two-time Olympic gold medallist Kaitlyn Lawes said Tuesday at the Scotties, where she is playing third on Team Canada.
“I’m not too sure what the right answer is, but I do think we have to find a way to evolve with the sport, now that the Olympics are such a big carrot for people. It’s hard to find four players who all live in the same place, and now you’re physically making people have to move in order to play the game.”
Several Scotties teams are using imports.
Team Canada’s Jennifer Jones lives in Shanty Bay, Ont., but still represents the St. Vital Curling Club in Winnipeg. Tracy Fleury lives in Sudbury, Ont., but is skipping Team Manitoba.
Then there’s the Homan team, from Ottawa.
Second Joanne Courtney of Edmonton has been an import on the team for a long time and this year Homan moved to Alberta with her husband. She’s still eligible to play for the team only because she’s enrolled at the University of Alberta.
It’s not like Canada is suffering greatly on the international stage. Jones won the women’s world championship last year and Homan won it the year before.
But Homan’s team struggled mightily at the Olympics in South Korea and missed the podium, as did the Canadian men’s team skipped by Calgary’s Kevin Koe.
The theory for those struggles is that other countries around the world are getting better and have the ability to beat Canada more regularly.
“All those other countries are coming in and chasing after us,” Saskatchewan skip Robyn Silvernagle said. “They’re really good, so to keep up to that, you almost have to have no residency rules.”
That wouldn’t sit well with many of the other curling stakeholders. Some of the member associations that send teams to the Scotties and Brier want tighter residency rules. So do many fans, TV rights holders and many curlers, especially those who dream of getting a chance to represent their province in the Brier or Scotties and want to keep a level playing field.
Curling Canada is certainly discussing all this, knowing that it’s going to be very difficult to make everybody happy.
“The changes that happened in residency rules a few years back were based on trying to strike a really good balance between our high-performance needs and respecting the traditions of the sport and ensuring that the system stays really healthy,” Curling Canada CEO Katherine Henderson said in an interview with Postmedia. “And there’s a tension between those things. But all we’re ever really trying to do is find the balance between all those things.”
Though many ideas have been floated on how to fix this problem — from something drastic like creating a two-tier system for curling that could diminish the importance of the Brier and Scotties to grandfathering more players into residency requirements for provincial playdowns — there’s not likely a quick or easy solution.
Many elite curlers are in favour of a two-tier system. The idea is that the Brier and Scotties could remain national championships in the traditional format, but it wouldn’t be a qualifier for the world championship. Instead, an event like the Canada Cup, held annually in December except in Olympic years, when it’s replaced by the trials, could be used to pick international representatives.
The problem with that plan is that the Brier and Scotties would lose much of their star power and would likely be less appealing to Canadian curling fans.
The other idea that’s talked about a lot is grandfathering, the idea being that an athlete who grew up and curled in a province could continue to represent that province, even after moving away.
I think we do have to dare to try something new . ... We have to find a way to evolve with the sport, now that the Olympics are such a big carrot for people.