THUNDER BAY – Krista McCarville is determined to make a return to the Scotties Tournament of Hearts.
The Thunder Bay curler, who took the past season off from the competitive game to focus on being a wife, mother and teacher, will return to the ice with her sights set on competing against the top teams in the country.
“I knew I needed some time off and I knew I need a little bit of a break,” she said in an interview earlier this week.
“I think that time off told me I needed to come back because I’m such a competitive person that I felt like something was missing last year.”
Though if the 32-year-old McCarville does return to the Scotties for the first time since 2010, when she claimed bronze, she’ll be playing under a different flag than in her previous experiences.
The four-time Ontario representative will now be battling for the Northern Ontario berth which was just added to the women’s national championship last year. McCarville previously represented the region three times during her junior national days and said it’s a special experience.
“It’s really exciting. Whenever you competed against all of Ontario it was exciting when you won because you’re winning all of Ontario but there are less teams so you have a better chance of winning,” she said.
“It’s nice to represent Northern Ontario and show where we are on the map and that we have good teams here and can compete against the rest of Canada.”
This season marks the first competitive push for McCarville since the fall of 2013, when she made a run towards an Olympic berth. In the pre-trials, her team won their first two games before dropping a pair consecutively to be eliminated.
She admitted she needed to regain her competitive spark after falling in the Ontario qualifiers for three straight years from 2011 to 2013 after a banner 2009-2010 season where she came two wins away from representing Canada at the Vancouver Olympics and then months later ending up two wins away from winning the Scotties.
What really reaffirmed McCarville’s desire to return was watching last year’s Northern Ontario playdowns, which were being held on her home ice at the Fort William Curling Club.
There she saw longtime teammate Sarah Potts, who will return as lead, playing on a team skipped by Sudbury’s Kendra Lilly. The Lilly rink advanced to the final, narrowly losing to Tracy Horgan, but McCarville was awed by the young skip.
“I saw something in Kendra. She’s a very good player. She’s young but she has a very good competitive drive, seems very smart on the ice and seems so calm and cool,” McCarville said.
That compelled McCarville to bring Lilly into the fold, where she will serve as third and vice-skip. Former teammate Ashley Sippala will also return to the ice, serving as the second.
The team has entered five bonspiels -- three in the United States, one in Manitoba and one in Saskatchewan – to tune up their games in advance of the Northern Ontario playdowns, which will be held in late January in Timmins.
To prepare, the squad has been hitting the gym to keep up in a sport where physical fitness is quickly becoming nearly as significant a focus as throwing rocks.
“I think back to the pre-trials where we had three games in one day and they were very crucial games. I think if I was more physically fit, and the team was more physically fit, then maybe we could have prevailed and won one more game,” McCarville said.
“We’re doing the best we can this summer. We’re working out like crazy and I can’t see other teams working out harder than us.”
