B.C.’s Wark wins tiebreaker, Jones also heating up in the championship round
Team Canada hands Alberta their 1st loss
SYDNEY, N.S. — Team Canada’s Jennifer Jones did not look like a six-time Scotties Tournament of Hearts champion during the preliminary round at Centre 200.
The arrival of the championship round Thursday afternoon appeared to change things.
With a delicate tapback for three in the seventh end, vintage Jones had returned and she carried it through a 10-8 win over Alberta’s Chelsea Carey.
After a week of near-misses, feather ticks and so-so play, Jones looked sparked.
The slumping body language was gone. High-fives with teammates Kaitlyn Lawes, Jocelyn Peterman and Dawn McEwen were firmer. The smiles were back.
“It felt like — finally,” Jones said. Her team stole a pair in the eighth end and Jones closed it out with a confident hit in the 10th to hand Carey her first loss of the competition.
“Honestly, I’ve felt like I’ve thrown a lot of good rocks and they just haven’t worked out,” Jones said. “It just felt like one of those weeks where everything that could go against us did.
“To make that big three — and it was a tough shot — the girls swept it great. That was a big turning point.”
Jones improved to 5-3 in the opening draw for the eight teams who made the cut for the championship round with the win over Carey. But she still has her work cut out for her moving forward after falling 9-6 to Ontario’s Rachel Homan in Thursday’s evening draw.
Carey, the 2016 Scotties champion, fell to 7-2 overall with back-to-back losses on Thursday, including a 10-6 defeat against P.E.I.’s Suzanne Birt.
“It’s kind of good to get it over with,” Carey said after the setback to Jones.
Saskatchewan’s Robyn Silvernagle posted an 11-5 victory over Northern Ontario’s Krista McCarville, British Columbia’s Sarah Wark stole a point in the 10th end for a 9-8 win over Birt and Homan defeated Team Wild Card’s Casey Scheidegger 9-2 to round out the afternoon draws.
Silvernagle and Homan are tied with Carey atop the standings with 7-2 records. Scheidegger, Birt and McCarville are at 6-3.
“We’ve got a ton of tough games ahead, so we’ve got to keep putting the pedal down,” Homan said.
Wark eliminated Manitoba’s Tracy Fleury earlier in the day in a tiebreaker. But B.C. is now at 5-4 — alongside Jones at the bottom of the standings — after being toppled 8-6 by Silvernagle in evening play.
Preliminary-round records carried over into the championship round, which runs through tonight.
The top four teams will qualify for the Page Playoffs on Saturday. The semifinal and final will be played Sunday.
Jones is looking to set a record with a seventh Scotties title as a skip. She shares the current mark with Colleen Jones.
The winning team will represent Canada at the March 16-24 world women’s curling championship in Silkeborg, Denmark.
Wark’s team isn’t used to crosscountry travel, arena ice, top-flight competition or the national spotlight. But you wouldn’t know it by her debut here.
Wark has embraced the big stage this week and unexpectedly made the championship round to boot.
“We felt really good about the way that we played the game and felt like we deserved to win,” Wark said of prevailing in the tiebreaker to make the eight-team cut.
The numbers back that up. Wark led all players by shooting 90 per cent, well ahead of Fleury at 66 per cent.
“If you would have told us at the beginning of the week that we would be playing a tiebreaker for a spot in the championship round, we would have been thrilled.”