Mixing and matching

Continental Cup in Vegas has new team scramble

Kaitlyn Lawes playing third for Rachel Homan, Ben Hebert throwing lead stones for U.S. skip John Shuster and Sweden’s Niklas Edin calling games with Scotland’s Jennifer Dodds as his vice are all possible scenarios in this year’s Continental Cup of Curling. The format of the annual RyderCup style competition between North American and international sides starting Thursday in Las Vegas will include a day of “scramble” games, in which skips will play alongside thirds and a frontend player from another team.

The Continental Cup will still include traditional team, mixed doubles and skins games over four days. But Saturday’s scramble draws reduce the number of regular team draws from six to two. The women will shuffle their lineups Saturday morning with the men following suit in the afternoon.

A mixed scramble at night – with at least one female skip per side – ups the intrigue with skips playing with an unfamiliar vice of the other gender.

“So, you are going to have skips with new thirds, leads with new seconds,” explained Nolan Thiessen, Curling Canada’s manager of championship services.

“It’s going to be mixed up in that the back ends are going to be a different dynamic and the front ends are going to be a different dynamic.”

The curlers wanted to try this, so Thiessen “had to really get down in the weeds,” he said, and come up with a template.

“Because the skip and the third and that dynamic is so interesting and important, one of the things I wanted to do was have that change so it does create that different dynamic,” he said. Canada skip Jennifer Jones watches a shot come in as they face Denmark at the World Women’s Curling Championship in March 2018 in North Bay, Ont.

The Continental Cup, in both its 15th season and fourth stint in Las Vegas, was the incubator for mixed doubles. That discipline is now in the Olympics.

The tournament is the perfect environment to experiment because it doesn’t impact qualification for Olympic Games or world championships, Thiessen said.

“It’s a great place because there’s no real end-game after Sunday,” he said. “It’s a standalone entity, so it’s fun to be able to try things.

“This is where mixed doubles came from, where it was originally tried and adapted and eventually became an Olympic sport. I don’t think the team scramble will become an Olympic sport.” Rinks skipped by Canada’s Homan, Jennifer Jones, Kevin Koe

and Brad Gushue, join forces with Jamie Sinclair and reigning Olympic champion Shuster of the U.S. to comprise Team North America.

Pete Fenson of the U.S. is North America’s captain. Canada’s Jeff Stoughton and Jill Officer will serve as coach and assistant coach, respectively. Stoughton curled for North America in the Continental Cup in both 2012 and its first time in Sin City in 2014. The former world champion said the curlers themselves are doing most of the mixing and matching for the women’s and men’s scrambles.

A decision on the mixed scramble lineups could happen right before that draw, he said.

“The teams certainly know each other and certainly sent their suggestions and talked together,”

Stoughton said. “They basically made up the teams themselves because they see each other so much at the Grand Slams. That’s fine by me.

“For the mixed scramble, we’re just going to wait. That one we can kind of make a judgment call as we go along to see who is playing well and who wants to play. “That one, we haven’t made any calls yet and we’re not releasing that yet so the other side knows what we’re doing.”

The World squad features Sweden’s Edin and Anna Hasselborg, Scotland’s Bruce Mouat and Eve Muirhead and Switzerland’s Peter de Cruz and Silvana Tirinzoni.

Scotland’s David Murdoch is their captain and Sweden’s Fredrik Lindberg will coach.