THUNDER BAY – To be the best, Krista McCarville and Ashley Sippala know they’ll have to beat the best.
They’ll have plenty of opportunities to prove the mantra this coming week at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts, being staged at their hometown Fort William Gardens, albeit isolated from their families and friends inside the COVID-mandated bubble.
There’s a chance their partners and children will be able to watch live in person on the weekend, but they have to get there first, surviving a round robin that will pit them against the likes of Tracy Fleury, their former Northern Ontario rival and the top-ranked team in the nation, Rachel Homan’s three-time champion rink – albeit minus their skip who’s chasing Olympic mixed doubles gold – and the third wild-card entry, Chelsea Carey, a two-time Scotties champion who’s first title came at Team McCarville’s expense in 2016.
They open against Carey on Friday night.
“I think every single time I play against here we get really fired up because you always think back to that last final game and how meaningful it was – and the fact that she beat us – so of course every time we play her we want to play well,” McCarville said on Sunday, wrapping up her final practice before entering the Scotties bubble.
It doesn’t get any easier outside the wild-card entries, with the likes of Saskatchewan’s Penny Barker, New Brunswick’s Andrea Crawford and P.E.I.’s Suzanne Birt, a former Scotties bronze medallist, helping fill out the Pool A bracket, along with Newfoundland and Labrador’s Sarah Hill and Nunavut’s Brigitte MacPhail.
“If we’re going to win this competition, we want to play the best teams,” McCarville said. “We have a really good pool and I think if we can get out of that pool with a top three, we’d be pretty happy. We want to beat the best to do it.”
Sippala, who turned 35 last Friday, said the wait for a hometown Scotties has been tough, the competition delayed by a year because of COVID-19.
It’s not how they imagined it would play out, but after declining a bid last year in Calgary, there was no way they were going to miss out playing at home, fans or no fans in the stands.
“It seems a bit strange and I’ll kind of believe it when it happens,” said Sippala, making her sixth Scotties appearance.
“We are super excited, and yes, we wish our families could be there, but we’ll still feel the support for sure.”
