Former junior rink rolling in Airdrie
Team Chyz heads to semi with big wins
Nadine Chyz’s Friday didn’t get off to an outstanding start. The 21-year-old Calgary skip, whose team is playing out of the Glencoe club this season, arrived at the Airdrie Curling Club to take part in her first Southern Alberta women’s championship after wrapping up a splendid junior career last season with a second-place finish at the M and M Meat Shops Canadian junior championships at the North Hill club.
But when she stepped out of her car, she discovered, to her dismay, that she had been driving with a flat tire.
A bad omen? Not quite; in fact, it would be the low point of an otherwise terrific opening day at the 12team Southerns as her team — third Rebecca Pattison, second Whitney More and lead Kimberly Anderson — opened with a solid 6-3 win over Calgary’s Dana Ferguson (the top-ranked entry in the field on the Canadian Team Ranking System) before rolling into this morning’s A-event semifinal with a 10-1 thrashing of Jackie Brett of Calgary.
That left the Chyz foursome just two wins shy of clinching a berth in the Scotties Alberta women’s championship, which kicks off Jan. 25 in Leduc — not bad for a team that entered the 2011-12 curling season with a different set of priorities than 12 months earlier.
“Last year, we were all ready for our last year of juniors and we were all really dedicated to curling,” said Chyz, who’s scheduled to graduate in April from Mount Royal University with her degree in disability studies. “Transitioning to women’s, we’ve kind of changed our priorities. The three of us who are still together are still a little more focused on school, and we knew that women’s competition was going to be harder. But we still have enjoyed doing the WCT events.”
And they’ve done not badly at them, either, making semifinal appearances in Medicine Hat and Lloydminster and coming awfully close to gaining a direct entry into the provincials from the Alberta Curling Tour.
But considering how this team dominated at the junior level, getting all the way to the national final before Chyz missed her final shot in the 10th end to hand the Team Canada jackets to Saskatchewan’s Trish Paulsen, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that it could handle itself at the next level.
“We had kind of set goals to qualify at a few bonspiels, which we did, and to make it to provincials,” said Pattison. “We were kind of allowing for that transition year and I think we’ve done pretty well with it. We’ve kept the same game plans; Nadine was very advanced in juniors with her strategy, so it’s the same kind of thing.”
The team made one change this season, bringing aboard Whitney More to replace second Jessie Scheidegger, who wanted to curl with her big sister Casey this season — and it just so happens Chyz will play Scheidegger in this morning’s A-event semi, beginning at 9:30 a.m., while Sheri Pickering of Calgary is up against High River’s Tanilla Doyle in the other semi. The winners meet at 2:30 p.m. to decide the first Southern berth into the provincials.
Perhaps the Chyz team’s biggest accomplishment this year was the way it bounced back from the heartbreak of losing the national final on last rock 11 months ago.
“It took a little while,” admitted Pattison. “It hurt; but you could only learn from it, right? I think we’ve done pretty well coming back from it. You just have to keep moving forward and don’t let that keep you down.”