McCarville hopeful for future after another tough exit at Scotties for Northern Ontario

KAMLOOPS, B.C. – It’s back to the drawing board for Krista McCarville and her rink out of the Fort William Curling Club in Thunder Bay after another tough exit from the Scotties Tournament of Hearts playoffs.

The Northern Ontario foursome – featuring McCarville, third Kendra Lilly, second Ashley Sippala, lead Sarah Potts and coach Rick Laing - dropped their semi-final clash to Canada’s Team Kerri Einarson, 7-5, Sunday afternoon at the Sandman Centre in Kamloops.

The game was an improvement from Saturday’s loss to Manitoba’s Team Jennifer Jones in 1 vs. 2 page playoff, but far from their strong 7-1 round robin performance which earned them the top seed in Pool B.

"Once again close, but not quite there," McCarville said. "Proud of the team for battling and working this hard and getting to the final day again in the Scotties, but of course very disappointing.”

Similar to Saturday’s playoff loss, the middle of McCarville’s lineup – Sippala and Lilly – were outplayed by their counterparts on Team Einarson in second Shannon Birchard and third Val Sweeting, leaving McCarville with difficult shot attempts throughout most of the game.

Sippala shot 79 per cent and Lilly 69 per cent on Sunday compared to 86 per cent and 84 per cent from Birchard and Sweeting, respectively. McCarville still managed to shoot a stronger percentage (79 per cent) than Einarson (71 per cent), who struggled at times during the win.

McCarville says the team as a whole weren’t as sharp with their draw weight in the playoff games.

“I felt like we managed our draw weight a lot better in the round robin,” she said. “I thought we had it [in the playoffs], but we were just a little bit off with our draw weight. When you’re playing great teams like Jones and Einarson, a hair short or a hair deep is a difference with them. I think that’s maybe where we went wrong.”

Team McCarville weren’t able to score an all-important deuce in the semi-final.

Strong runs at the Tournament of Hearts, capped by losses in the playoffs have been a recurring theme for Team McCarville since their formation in 2015.

In their six Scotties appearances together, the close-knit group have made the playoffs each time, losing in the gold-medal game in 2016 and last year in their hometown of Thunder Bay.

McCarville and company tweaked a few things during the off-season – including changing how they practise and a focus on mental performance - following their loss to Team Einarson in last year’s final and the skip is hoping they can build on those changes going forward into the 2023-24 curling campaign.

“We worked really hard this year and made a few changes,” explained McCarville. “We thought we were doing some things right and I though we were really consistent this year and maybe that’s a good thing for building into next year.”

Team McCarville’s consistency at the national championship is an impressive achievement for any rink, especially this foursome considering the limited schedule they play against elite competition leading up to the Scotties.

However, the 40-year-old McCarville says ramping up their schedule next year isn’t in the cards due to work, family and just the logistics of getting to places from up in Thunder Bay.

"We'd have to really dial down with our jobs and that's something we're not willing to do right now," she said. "We like our schedule. It would be easier if we could play some more [events] around us that didn't involve taking as much time off work. Being from Thunder Bay, it's a lot of time off work to even fly to Toronto, it’s two-to-three extra days sometimes with the way things are.”

McCarville is an elementary school teacher, Lilly works as an operations manager, Sippala is a lab technician and Potts is a social worker. McCarville, Sippala and Potts live in Thunder Bay while Lilly resides in Sudbury.

"You always want to be in that final,” said McCarville. “One day we're going to win. We just don't know when."