The Scott Tournament of Hearts

Are you a curling newbie? What do you need to know about the Scott to enjoy my coverage? Well, first the format: there are twelve teams competing. Each province sends a team (10—heck if you don’t know curling maybe you don’t know Canada either!), the territories send a team, and then there are the defending champions, who come back as Team Canada. To represent your province, you need to win a bunch of so-called ‘playdowns’, encompassing larger and larger areas until you are at the provincial version of the Scott Tournament of Hearts. The winner, said to ‘win her province’, goes to the national championship to compete.

Notables at this years Scott include past-champion Cathy King of Alberta, the recent winner of the Canada Cup; Colleen Jones of Nova Scotia, a six-time champion back for a 20th shot at the championship; Kelly Scott of British Columbia, 3rd last year, and who narrowly missed becoming our Olympic representatives; Heather Strong of Newfoundland and Labrador, who’d had a poor showing last time out at the Scott in her hometown; Kerry Koe of the Territories, returned again for another try; Andrea Kelly of New Brunswick, last year’s Canadian Junior champion who’d actually failed to get out of her province for juniors and decided to have a go at the women’s!

There were also a bunch of, to me, relative unknowns: Janet Harvey of Manitoba, Krista Scharf of Ontario, Suzanne Gaudet of PEI, Eve Belisle of Quebec, Tracy Streifel of Saskatchewan.

But then again, Kleibrink was unknown to me before the Olympic trials!

And of course, the team I’d supported long before they made the finals of last year’s Scott: Jennifer Jones, Team Canada.

And this is the lineup. I was disappointed in the absence of Jenn Hanna and Stephanie Lawton, who’d brought such brilliant play to last year’s Scott, but thought I’d probably enjoy myself anyway. And one of these unknowns might just turn out to be a star… after all, after two years abroad, I hadn’t heard of Jennifer Jones until last year!

The tournament is a round robin: all teams play each of the others over 6 days, two games a day (except the first weekend). The top four teams make the playoffs. I’ll describe that format when we get there.

For curling basics… well, check out this website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curling. I’m not going to teach it here. Chances are you’ve at least watched some curling if you are interested in my blog!

Oh and fair warning... though I did write and date these posts as shown, they were not published til much later and occasionally you'll see that I jumped ahead... a writer's liberty taken, I suppose.