Carleton’s women’s curling team is preparing for their first-ever Ontario University Athletics (OUA) championship and their first time playing at a competitive tournament as a team.
“We haven’t had a whole lot of time to compete together,” said team skip Lynn Kreviazuk, a third-year political science student.
“We have been meeting regularly for practices, just to kind of mesh together. But we’re all really, really close, so the dynamics will work really well.”
All five team members compete on separate competitive teams, which has made it difficult to find time to play together. And they’ve been kept busy with their own individual successes.
Second-year international business student Jamie Sinclair, the vice on Carleton’s team, is skipping Team Ontario at the Canadian Juniors Feb. 4-12.
“It’s exciting, more than anything,” Sinclair said of the chance to compete in the national championship, her first appearance at that level. “I’m just excited to go and have that experience.”
When Sinclair returns, the team will have less than a week before they head to Guelph, Ont. for the OUA championship tournament, which will take place Feb. 16-20.
“All of them are extremely accomplished and very good curlers in their own right,” said Doug Kreviazuk, the team’s coach and Lynn’s father. “Where they’ll be challenged is they haven’t played together.”
The Ravens will face some stiff competition. Their first match pits them against a Wilfred Laurier University team which won the Canadian Interuniversity Sport championship last year, and is fresh off an international victory in Japan last month.
“Laurier is definitely on top when it comes to curling,” Lynn said. “They do a really awesome job at funding their athletes, and so they’re going to be our main source of competition.”
That contrasts with the Carleton team, which, in its first year as a competitive club, hasn’t received any funding from the university. For now, the girls are paying their own way, purchasing jerseys and covering the $500 OUA entry fee out of pocket, Lynn said.
“If we do well this year, we’ll be approaching the university to say, ‘We think you need to step it up a little bit and give us more than simply the name of the university to compete,’ ” Doug said.
Doug said he hopes to see both the newly-founded men’s and women’s curling teams grow in the coming years.
“Our hope is that we show Carleton that this is an effective sport, especially in the Ottawa area,” Doug said. “This is a hotbed of curling.”
“There are a number of elite junior curlers that attend university here in town,” Doug said. “It just made absolute sense for them to try to evolve junior curling out of just the regular junior curling into the university.”
Regardless of how the women’s team fares in its first OUA showdown, Lynn said she’s optimistic about the future.
“It’s our first year, it’s our first appearance,” Lynn said. “Hopefully we’ll have the same lineup next year and we’ll come back and hopefully we’ll win gold next year.”
