Carey rink earns bronze in third Nixon’s swan song
Team Canada vice declares retirement after Scotties win over Northern Ontario
ST. CATHARINES, ONT. Chelsea Carey goes home from the Canadian women’s curling championship with a bronze medal and a vacancy on her team.
Third Amy Nixon said Sunday’s 7-4 win over Northern Ontario’s Krista McCarville for bronze was the last game of her career at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts.
Nixon, 39, won the 2016 Canadian title with Carey and an Olympic bronze medal in 2006 with Shannon Kleibrink. She’s competed in six Canadian championships as vice for both Kleibrink and Carey.
“I’ve known for awhile this year that it’s just not a possibility for me to maintain what I’ve tried to do in the game,” Nixon said.
“I still love to compete and I love those girls, but I don’t like the grind anymore. I don’t have the fire for it. There’s other things that call on my time. I’d rather go skiing with my family and I’d rather bake cookies. I have a great job that I really enjoy and my career is taking off in a really productive way.”
Nixon’s announcement was sudden. She acknowledged she hadn’t talked to her teammates about her decision, so Carey wasn’t yet thinking about a replacement.
“We haven’t even talked about that yet, to be honest,” Carey said. “She’s mentioned it. She hadn’t formally told me that. I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about that yet.”
Nixon, a lawyer, is married with a three-year old daughter and is a senior adviser to the president of Mount Royal University in Calgary.
“Amy’s a special player, for sure,” Carey said. “She’s played so much third and she does it so well and knows what it takes from a shooting perspective, but more than that from a team management perspective.
“Managing skips is not necessarily the easiest thing and she’s very good at it.”
Carey’s Glencoe Club team includes front end Jocelyn Peterman and Laine Peters. They don’t yet have one of the nine women’s berths in December’s Olympic trials in Ottawa.
They do have a spot in the pretrials qualifier Nov. 6 to 12 in Summerside, P.E.I. The top two women’s teams from that tournament gain entry into the Olympics trials.
This year’s Team Canada as the defending champion, Carey went 9-2 in the preliminary round to secure the third playoff seed.
They lost 8-1 to McCarville in Saturday’s 3-4 game to drop to the bronze medal game.
“I’ve been on the podium in different positions and to do it with the Maple Leaf on my back is very, very special,” Nixon said.
“Our team was very motivated and all together today, and that’s a very nice way to end.”
Meanwhile, the storyline heading into Sunday night’s gold medal game was whether a veteran skip could best one of the top young guns in the game today.
Manitoba’s Michelle Englot’s best finish in seven previous appearances as a skip at the Scotties came in 1989 when she was known as Michelle Schneider and her rink was based in Regina. That year she lost to defending national champion Heather Houston of Ontario in the semifinal.
One month after that, Rachel Homan was born in Ottawa.
Now, 28 years later, Homan and her powerhouse Ontario rink are all that stand in the way of the 53-year-old Englot’s crowning achievement in curling: Her first women’s national championship.
Homan beat Northern Ontario’s McCarville 7-5 Saturday to earn the berth in the gold medal game.
Englot earlier defeated Homan 9-5 in a round robin match on Thursday, and 9-8 victory in the one-two Page playoff Friday.