Hugh Stewart
The Scotland Women’s Curling Team gather one last time at Lanarkshire Ice Rink the weekend before heading to Canada to compete in Ontario and Quebec.Curler Anna Acton remembers the welcoming banners at the reception her Canadian team got when they arrived in Scotland to tour the country.
“After an exhausting overnight flight, it was so uplifting to see the welcoming committee with banners,” says Acton, one of the 23 women who went on the Canadian Women’s Curling Tour of Scotland in 2010. “Everyone in the airport knew that Canada had arrived in Scotland.”
Acton of Sackville, N.B., hopes the Scottish friends she made on that trip receive the same type of reception when they arrive in Canada on Nov. 6 and Nov. 12 in Ottawa.
The Scottish Women’s Curling Tour is playing against 24 curling clubs across Quebec and Ontario over the span of three weeks.
The ladies are scheduled to play games in Ottawa at the R.A. Centre, the Ottawa Hunt Club and Centretown’s Ottawa Curling Club, which will be hosting them on Nov. 13.
Despite Scotland being the home of curling, it is one of the biggest participation sports in Canada according to Ottawa Curling Club representative Sandra Chisholm.
“There are more people that curl than do anything else in this country at least once a week. These two countries are basically the homes of curling and to have this ongoing friendly tour is important. It’s all about friendship and building the game,” Chisholm says.
Acton was able to witness the subtle differences in how the games were played between the two countries on her tour five years ago.
“We in Canada are spoiled with our great ice conditions, in Scotland it was surprising to come off the ice from your curling game and then see skaters take to the same sheet of ice. Something unheard of here,” she says.
The Ottawa Curling Club will have a small opening ceremony before their game against the Scottish women, who will be led on to the ice by a bagpiper. Marian Dupont, a member of the Governor General’s Curling Club, will throw the ceremonial rock.
These tours are a tradition that began in 1955 when the Canadian women went to Scotland at the invitation of the Royal Caledonian Curling Club. The tours alternate between the two countries every five years.
When the Scottish curlers tour Canada, they only visit one region at a time. Their visit to Central Canada this year marks the first in 30 years. Atlantic Canada hosted them last in 2005.
The women who are interested in the tour send in an application and they are chosen based on what they have done in the curling community.
Shelagh Fulton, from Perth, Scotland, has been curling for 25 years. She is one of the lucky women chosen to participate in this year’s tour to Canada.
Fulton says she is excited for the opportunity to meet some of the Canadian women, like Acton, that she met when they visited her hometown on their tour.
“I am looking forward to meeting again the Canadian women who came to Scotland five years ago. I was playing against them when they came to my home ice rink in Perth,” Fulton wrote in an email to Centretown News before she left Scotland. “My opponent was from Prince Edward Island, Sheila Compton, and I hope to meet up with her again. That will be amazing.”
Fulton will get this opportunity during the last weekend of the tour in Niagara Falls.
Sixteen women from the 2010 Canadian tour to Scotland will be joining the Scottish group for a reunion. The tour will conclude in Mississauga at the end of November, where the Muriel Fage Trophy will be awarded to the winning country.
Canada won the trophy in 2010 when the Canadian women competed in Scotland.
“Of course there are a bit of bragging rights involved, but most important are the friendships made,” Acton says.