CURLING MOMENTUM
Silvernagle is aiming high
Robyn Silvernagle chased her green jacket for years.
It took a long time to catch the thing, broke her heart a few times, but she finally pulled it on last season when she won her first-ever Saskatchewan Scotties. She followed that feat with a bronze medal at the national Scotties, and now Silvernagle is trying to replicate the feeling in 2019-20.
“It’s a goal I wanted since I was a little kid,” Silvernagle, who plays out of North Battleford, said Wednesday. “To finally be able to achieve it is amazing. But I still don’t feel satisfied. Now, I want to win it, and go to worlds and win that. There’s always more goals to chase. Once you can check one off, you’re like ‘OK, next goal — moving on.’ It’s obviously amazing, and I’m forever grateful for the experience of it. But I definitely want to get back there that much more, now that I have experienced it.”
Silvernagle, who won a provincial junior title in 2005, had some close calls while pursuing that Saskatchewan Scotties crown. She placed third in 2016, and lost the final in both 2017 and 2018 before breaking through with a last-end steal to edge Sherry Anderson 6-5 last season.
She won that title with a newlook team including longtime star skip Stefanie Lawton at third, along with Jessie Hunkin at second and Kara Thevenot at lead.
The quartet flowed nicely into their campaign, making the playoff round in three different Grand Slams while earning that national Scotties berth and rolling a long ways there.
They’re not exactly off to a blazing start this season, but Silvernagle notes the importance of the process.
They’re 9-8 through three World Curling Tour stops, with one playoff appearance that ended in a quarter-final loss to Kerri Einarson at the early-season Booster Juice Shootout in Edmonton. They lost C-finals in both Saskatoon and Calgary.
“It’s been OK. Not terrible,” says Silvernagle, whose team resumes play at next week’s Masters in North Bay, Ont. — the first of four Slams on the WCT schedule.
“I wouldn’t say we’re at the top of our game at the moment, but it takes that building again, learning new things. Different things come about as the year goes on, and we’re getting back into it.”
She acknowledges, when asked, that she’s gained a certain measure of fame in the broader public since last season’s Scotties appearance. She’s recognized at restaurants. More people follow the team on Facebook. Expectations are higher.
And it’s nice, she says, to hit the ice with the same women who did so many notable things together last season.
“It’s awesome to go to the rink for the first time and be ‘oh, I know everybody, and I know how they throw. Isn’t that fantastic?’” Silvernagle says. “That chemistry thing is already built, and the trust. The team dynamic, we know it’s good and it works. You don’t have to work so hard at building that.
“Yes, we’re trying to tweak and make everything better, but that initial starting point ... we’re leaps and bounds ahead this year of where we were last year.”
Silvernagle is scheduled to open next week’s Masters on Wednesday against Casey Scheidegger — skipped by Amber Holland while Scheidegger prepares for the birth of her second child — with a followup match against Kerri Einarson in the evening.