1 day Ago By Leith Dunick
THUNDER BAY – It was the shot heard round Port Arthur. Krista McCarville, the four-time defending Northern Ontario women’s curling champion, needed a miracle. Her prayers were answered.
Capitalizing on a rare mistake by Timmins skip Lauren Mann that left McCarville with a chance to score three, and possibly four, to pull out an improbable run, the veteran skip and two-time Scotties Tournament of Hearts runner up fired a bullet down the sheet, blasted Mann’s stones out of scoring position and leapt in the air as she realized she’d scored the four she needed to pull out a 9-8 win that sent them to Sunday morning’s semifinal. It was an unlikely end to a game that saw the foursome struggle to make shots or read the ice, routinely coming up short when they needed a shot the most, throwing away several points at various stages of the game – and then gave up three to Mann in the ninth to seemingly put the game out of reach. “At that point, what we really wanted to do was make sure we could get our three.
When she missed her last one and kind of gave me that opportunity for four, you’ve got to take it,” McCarville said. “Because going into an extra trying to steal is never ideal. “You had to give it a go and we knew that spot because I just threw it.
You make your three, it’s good, make the four it’s even better.” Down 5-2 at the break, McCarville was set up to score three in the sixth, but came up short on a draw on her first shot and couldn’t save her deuce on her second. She got both missed shots back in the seventh and eighth, stealing singles, but things fell apart in the ninth when she crashed on a guard, leaving Mann a draw for three and a seemingly insurmountable 8-5 lead.
They never doubted themselves, said third Andrea Kelly, the former Team New Brunswick skip brought in last year to try to help propel McCarville, Sarah Potts, Kendra Lilly and Ashley Sippala to a national championship. “Going into that end, almost every time we had hammer that game, we had an opportunity for two or three. We knew we could work hard and have the opportunity to do that.
That’s all we wanted to do, and then one really bad miss by them, shooting our guard in, really helped formulate that four,” Kelly said. Team McCarville finished the round robin with a 5-1 record, tied for first place with the team from Sudbury, skipped by Ottawa’s Emma Artichuk, and Despins, who edged McCarville 9-8 on Friday night. The first tiebreaker is combined record in games involving the teams in the tiebreak, which was 1-1 all around.
The second tie break is the score from the weeklong draw-to-the-button competition before each match, which went to Artichuk, earning her an automatic berth in Sunday afternoon’s final, thanks in part to an 8-3 win over Thunder Bay’s Claire Dubinsky rink. The win might have been the momentum McCarville needed to possibly pull out another Northern Ontario championship. “We’ve been working so hard all year.
I feel like this is our year. I want to represent Northern Ontario at the Scotties here in Thunder Bay. It’s a do-over from a couple of years ago during COVID,” McCarville said.
Mann finished 4-2, alone in fourth. The news wasn’t as happy for defending men’s champion Trevor Bonot, who watched Sault Ste. Mare’s Sandy McEwan score two in the 10th to eke out a 7-6 in the C-side qualifier, earning his team a berth in Sunday’s semifinal against Thunder Bay’s Dylan Johnston.
The men’s and women’s semifinal start at 9 a.m. at Port Arthur Curling Centre.
The women’s final is at 1:30 p.m. and the men’s final goes at 5:30 p.
m..
