(Note — this story has been edited to reflect that Robert Campbell holds the record for longest gap between Canadian championship victories)
There will be no shortage of champions on the ice when the 2021 Canadian Mixed Curling Championship gets underway at the Canmore Golf and Curling Club in Alberta’s picturesque Bow Valley from Nov. 7-14.
The 14-team competition will see teams battling not only for a national championship, but also the right to represent Canada at the 2022 World Mixed Curling Championship, Oct. 15-22 in Aberdeen, Scotland.
That would certainly be a motivating factor for Team Northern Ontario, featuring skip Trevor Bonot and vice-skip Jackie McCormick, who won the 2017 Canadian mixed crown in Yarmouth, N.S., and went on to win a silver medal for Canada at the 2017 World Mixed Championship in Champéry, Switzerland. The Thunder Bay squad has a new front end, with Mike McCarville and Amanda Gates (a veteran of four Scotties Tournament of Hearts) rounding out the lineup.
Another former Canadian mixed champ has a chance to join elite Canadian curling company. Quebec skip Jean-Michel Ménard won his first Canadian mixed crown in 2001 at Weyburn, Sask., and with a win in Canmore would have a 20-year gap between victories at a national championship event. That would be the second longest gap between Canadian championship victories; only the 22-year gap between Robert Campbell’s victories at the 1989 and 2011 Canadian mixed championships would be longer.
Ménard, who also won the Tim Hortons Brier in 2006 before claiming silver at that year’s World Men’s Championship, has a lineup from Etchemin/Des Collines that should have him in the hunt to break that record, as his team includes 10-time Quebec women’s champ and former Canadian junior women’s champ Marie-France Larouche at vice-skip and Larouche’s long-time teammate (and Ménard’s wife) Annie Lemay at lead. Second Ian Belleau rounds out the team.
New Brunswick also will bring plenty of championship experience. The Fredericton team is skipped by two-time Tim Hortons Brier bronze-medallist James Grattan, and has five-time Scotties participant Jillian Babin at vice-skip and four-time Tim Hortons Brier player Jamie Brannen at second, with Jaclyn Crandall rounding out the team at lead.
Jamie Koe, meanwhile, will return as Northwest Territories skip, looking to improve on the silver (2015) and bronze (2019) medals he’s won at previous editions of the Canadian Mixed Championship. The 14-time Tim Hortons Brier rep from Yellowknife will be backed up by vice-skip Margot Flemming, second Cole Parsons and lead Megan Koehler.
(L-R): Jamie Newson, Melissa Morrow, Andrew MacDougall, Miranda Ellis
Rounding out the field are Alberta’s Team Craig MacAlpine from Edmonton; B.C.’s Team Sébastien Robillard from Kamloops, Manitoba’s Team Alex Forrest from Winnipeg; Newfoundland and Labrador’s Team Keith Ryan from Labrador City; Nova Scotia’s Team Craig Burgess from Truro; Nunavut’s Team Peter Van Strien from Iqaluit; Ontario’s Team Mike McLean from Ottawa; Prince Edward Island’s Team Jamie Newson from Summerside; Saskatchewan’s Team Dean Grindheim from North Battleford; and Yukon’s Team Terry Miller from Whitehorse.
The championship features 14 teams (10 provinces plus Northern Ontario, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon) seeded and separated into two pools of seven teams each. The teams first play a round robin within their pool. At the conclusion of the round robin, the top four teams in each pool advance to the Championship Pool, when the teams play the teams from the opposite pool, carrying forward their full win-loss records. Meanwhile, the bottom three teams in each pool will go to the Seeding Pool, where they will compete against the three teams from the opposite pool to determine the final standings and set up the seedings for the 2022 Canadian Mixed Championship.
The Championship Pool concludes on Saturday and will be followed by two semifinals Sunday, Nov. 14, at 9:30 a.m. (all times Mountain), pitting 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3 in the Championship Pool standings. The two winners then advance to the gold-medal final Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. while the two losing teams meet in the bronze-medal game at the same time.
All games throughout the competition are eight ends. Also, no tiebreaker games will be played at the conclusion of either round. Instead, any unsolvable ties for position after head-to-head results will be determined by accumulated Draw Shot results.
Ticket information for the 2021 Canadian Mixed in Canmore is available by CLICKING HERE.
Live-streaming coverage of the 2021 Canadian Mixed will be available on Curling Canada’s YouTube page. You can access the broadcast schedule by CLICKING HERE.
For event, team and draw information, visit www.curling.ca/2021mixed.
Draw scores/standings will be immediately available on Curling Canada’s scoring website.
It is the first time Alberta has hosted the event since Calgary in 2008, where the hometown favourite Dean Ross claimed the gold-medal victory. Alberta hosted previous renditions of the Canadian Mixed in 2000 (Lethbridge, won by Alberta’s Kevin Koe), 1994 (Leduc, won by New Brunswick’s Grant Odishaw), 1992 (Grande Prairie, won by local Kurt Balderston) and 1976 (Lethbridge, won by B.C.’s Tony Eberts).
The Canadian Mixed Championship made its debut in Toronto in 1964 and has been won a leading 11 times by Alberta. Saskatchewan is next with 10 titles.
Alberta’s most recent victory came in 2016 when Mick Lizmore’s Edmonton team prevailed in Toronto.
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