KNOWLEDGE GOES A LONG WAY
Carey’s team may be new, but Team Canada skip has played on the world stage before
Perhaps Chelsea Carey is on to something.
For the second time in her curling career, she joined a new team this year and won the Canadian women’s championship.
“People have given me a lot of grief about changing teams all the time, but it kinda seems to work,” Carey said as her team finished off preparations for a trip to Denmark for the world women’s curling championship, which starts Saturday in Silkeborg.
“It’s a new team to me, but (second) Dana (Ferguson) and (lead) Rachel (Brown) have been playing together for 10 years and (third) Sarah (Wilkes) has been their fifth at a lot of big events for the last three or four years. They’re not new to each other at all. They are very familiar.
“It was just a matter of figuring out a way for me to fit in, but that’s what happened in 2016 as well. The team had all played together and I subbed in at skip and it worked for us then, too.”
Carey wore the Maple Leaf for the first time at the worlds in 2016, in Swift Current, Sask., along with Amy Nixon, Jocelyn Peterman and Laine Peters. They finished fourth in the round robin and lost the 3 vs. 4 Page playoff game to Russia’s Anna Sidorova.
Nixon retired after the 2017 season and the rest of the team broke up after last season. They lost the Olympic trials final to Rachel Homan in late 2017 and also fell in the wild card game at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts in 2018.
The new team was formed out of the remnants of Val Sweeting’s Edmonton team, after the skip left to play with Kerri Einarson in Manitoba.
Carey is the only player on the team who has played in a world championship, though she wisely added six-time Canadian champion and Olympic gold medallist Jill Officer as fifth player.
“The other three are in Edmonton and I’m in Calgary, so we’re not together and it’s limited what they can lean on me for,” Carey said.
“But certainly Jill and I have been trying to take on the list of things we need to get done and that kind of thing because we’ve done it before.
“It’s been very, very busy, but it’s not my first time doing it, so I knew what was coming.”
Carey’s father and coach, Dan Carey, also competed in a world championship once, losing the semifinal as the third for Winnipeg’s Vic Peters in 1992.
Between the two Careys and Officer, it should be a suitable amount of experience.
“That is a big factor,” Chelsea Carey said.
“It’s not anything specific, it’s knowing what to expect and knowing what it’s gonna feel like. It’s the same thing I said when I went to my second Scotties.
“No one can tell you that. Experiencing it is irreplaceable. Just going in, knowing how it’s going to feel is going to be helpful.”
It won’t be easy for Canada to defend the gold medal won by Jennifer Jones last year in North Bay, Ont.
Among the teams in the field are those skipped by Olympic champion Anna Hasselborg of Sweden, Swiss Olympian Silvana Tirinzoni and Russia’s Alina Kovaleva, who made a name for herself on the World Curling Tour this year.
After that, however, there is a lot more fresh blood than there has been in other years.
“I wouldn’t say it’s the usual suspects,” said Carey, who opens against South Korea on Saturday night. “It’s a couple of teams that we play on tour all the time, Tirinzoni and Hasselborg, but I don’t think we’ve played that many of the others.
“The Korean team are juniors and are quite young, so we’re not familiar with them; the Japanese team is new; it’s a different Danish team from the last time I was there; and I don’t know anything about Great Britain, either. I know they beat Eve Muirhead (Scotland) in the final, but I’ve never seen them play. It’s not actually all that familiar. A bunch of them will be a newer experience for sure.
“There definitely are some inexperienced teams in the field, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily a bad thing for them. When you’re young and you’re excited and you come in, there’s no pressure on you, you can kinda cruise through as an underdog. Usually that’s a role that is kind of nice to be in.”
A few weeks after her team won the Scotties in Sydney, N.S., Carey still finds it hard to believe what happened on Cape Breton Island.
Her team stole points in the 10th end and the extra to cap a big comeback against Homan, the top team in the world. Homan came up light on draws in both ends, giving Carey the win.
“We did everything we could do, but it’s Rachel Homan, so you still expect her to make that shot,” Carey said. “We put the pressure on her the best way we could. It still feels surreal to win that way.”
Experiencing it (the world championships) is irreplaceable. Just going in, knowing how it’s going to feel is going to be helpful.