From left: Rachel Homan and teammates Emma Miskew, Alison Kreviazuk and Lisa Weagle.
(Photo: CP/Ryan Remiorz)
Perhaps she will realize that she’s wearing the tiara at the tender age of 23 and only three years removed from the junior ranks from which she graduated as a champion.
Perhaps she will be able to look back on the fact she did something so marvelous in front of a crowd of family, friends and supporters, only a two-hour drive from Ottawa, where she was born and lives.
This was the opportunity of a lifetime that may never come again and she came through it a winner.
"Unbelievable, it’s hard to describe," Homan said following her 9-6 win over Manitoba’s Jennifer Jones Sunday night in the 2013 Scotties Tournament of Hearts national women’s championship final at the K-Rock Centre.
Jones is a four-time Canadian champion and one-time world champion who only returned to competition in January following a layoff almost 10 months, during which she had knee surgery and gave birth to her first child. Jones lost the final for the second time in three years.
Jones' last loss in the finals took place in 2011 when Homan made her first appearance on the ladies’ scene. Homan finished fourth, but who could have predicted she could have risen so rapidly to her present status.
The win was no fluke. She and teammates Emma Miskew, Alison Kreviazuk and Lisa Weagle have dominated the 2012-13 World Curling Tour, easily distancing themselves from the pack with their strong play. They entered the tournament undefeated in 23 games, going back to the run that began in the Rogers Masters in November.
The victory has put the foursome in position to win a $100,000 bonus that Sportsnet put up for the women’s team that prevails in the Masters and Players’ Championship in Toronto in April. The two tournaments are the final two legs of the 2012-13 Grand Slam of Curling. Homan and her team just might end up with a royal bounty by the time this season is over.
Homan will enter the Players’ Championship after representing Canada in the world championships in Riga, Latvia on March 16.
"Rachel has always been one of the best shotmakers in the planet, it’s her leadership that is getting better and her ability to call a game," said the team’s coach Earle Morris, who first began working with Homan, Miskew and Kreviazuk as 13-year-olds. Weagle joined the foursome three years ago.
One celebrated Canadian men’s champion told me: "They’re going to be good. They are good."
Heading into the Scotties, the team was on a 23-0 winning streak. The quartet kept it going until Jones ended it at 30 by defeating the young Ontario squad in the round-robin. Homan and her team learned from the loss and defeated Jones in the battle of the top two teams on Saturday night to earn a bye to Sunday’s final. During the game, she made a tricky draw through a narrow port to take out a Jones stone and count three. It was voted the shot of the tournament.
The final began with Homan scoring three in the opening end with a draw to the house after Jones allowed her a relatively easy shot by wrecking on a guard with her final shot. Jones surrendered the hammer by scoring a point in the second and started to apply pressure on her opponent by stealing a point in the fourth.
It appeared as if the young team from the nation’s capital had started to unravel, particularly in the fifth end when Weagle committed a gaffe that may go down as a first in curling history.
While brushing a stone, she somehow got her broom wedged between the moving stone and a stationary Ontario stone that she was attempting to promote. The shot stone went airborn in the process. Weagle had lost track of where she was on the ice and the rocks were put back in place after an assessment by the umpire. Homan bailed her team out by scoring a point on a draw shot around a guard to the back of the four foot.
"It didn’t matter," Homan said about Weagle’s mistake. "Lisa said she’s sorry. I said, ‘I don’t want to hear it. It’s a team game. We took maybe 30 seconds to think about it and then it was gone."
"I don’t even think we talked about if for 30 seconds," Weagle added. "It’s unfortunate that happened, but you’ve got to move on from that."
Jones’ team simply made too many mistakes against a team that appears to capitalize on opportunities.
"I would have liked to make a few more shots, but it wasn’t meant to be," she said. "They played lights out. They deserved to win. They outcurled us…To come back and play the way we did all week, I’m pretty proud of the girls."
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