Disappointment fused with satisfaction are the feelings Chris Gardner says he and his team from Centretown’s Ottawa Curling Club felt as they fell short on their gold medal dreams in this year’s Canadian Mixed Curling Championship.
However, it’s not without the sense of accomplishment for winning bronze at the Nov. 6-15 tournament in North Bay and optimism for what this team could accomplish in the future.
Gardner admits it’s hard not to think about what could have been for his team – Trish Hill (vice), Jonathan Beuk (second) and Jessica Barcauskas (lead) – after a preliminary round which saw them post a perfect 6-0 won-lost record.
Despite their stellar round robin, a bad first end in the semi-final game against the team from the North West Territories extinguished any of the team’s chances at advancing to the World Mixed Championship next fall.
Instead, they settled for the bronze medal as they defeated British Columbia, 9-2 later that afternoon.
“Coming out of there with something is a great feeling,” Gardner says. “We were in first place basically the entire week so to go home with nothing would have been tremendously disappointing. “
Bronze wasn’t the only award the team ended up claiming that weekend as Barcauskas was named to the tournament’s all-star team as the top lead in the tournament.
“I trained all summer,” Barcauskas says. “I am very happy that it paid off in my performance last week. Winning the all-star title for my position was a huge accomplishment and very important goal of mine.”
The team will return to the Ottawa Curling Club to hone their skills against local competition action as the tournament marks the end of national competition for the mixed team.
According to the club’s professional and coach of the Rachel Homan rink, Earle Morris, this may be one of the best places in the world to uncover the components to put together a championship curling team.
“There is a winning atmosphere in the club that can’t help but to rub off on potential champions,” Morris says. “I think it’s the atmosphere of excellence that is something many clubs don’t have. There’s lots of people at the Ottawa Curling Club that know how to win.”
A mere foot inside the front door, this “winning attitude” is confirmed in the lobby of the Ottawa Curling Club. There, its winning history is plastered on its walls, encapsulated by the seemingly endless line of championship banners.
They range from the World Junior Championships to the banner awarded to the Homan rink as the champions in the 2013 Scotties Tournament of Hearts, but all have one thing in common – success.
It’s there the members of the Gardner rink will rejoin their individual teams in the infamous ‘Wednesday night league’ to focus on the upcoming play-downs to close out the curling season. The goal, Gardner says, is to continue working on their curling skills to prove to their competition next year that the bronze medal was merely a prelude to gold.
“I still think we were the best team there regardless of our result and we want to come back and prove that for sure next year,” Gardner says.
For now, Gardner says he has to appreciate how well the team did in their first year together on the national stage, hoping there will be many more opportunities for gold to come.
“Right now, it’s not such a big deal for me to have won a bronze but in 6 months from now or two years from now it’ll be wonderful to look back and say, ‘I got a bronze and that’s still pretty good,’ ” Gardner says. “There’s never any guarantee you’ll ever get back and do better than that.”