Staff
Erin Tomalty has watched her skip makes numerous pressure shots with the game on the line.
On Sunday, the Nestor Falls resident who calls the Fort Frances Curling Club her home rink got to make one of her own with that same skip cheering her on the entire way.
Facing a possible four-ender that would have won the game, Tomalty nullified enough opposition rocks with her final stone to give up just a steal of one and secure a 7-5 victory over Cassidy Romyn of Sioux Lookout in the deciding match-up of the Bantam Region 1 playdowns in Keewatin.
Tomalty’s usual gig is that of playing second for Hailey Beaudry, who has skipped her rink to several provincial playdowns in recent seasons.
But with Beaudry watching from the stands, Tomalty and her team of rotating seconds/thirds Tory and Anika Beaudry and lead Katrina Slomke, all from Fort Frances, completed the double round-robin event in first place with a 3-1 record.
Now it’s off to Thessalon for the provincial championships Feb. 5-8.
“It’s a little overwhelming,” chuckled the humble redhead, whose has all of six games under her belt as a skip.
“I didn’t expect us to go this far,” she admitted.
“We were just going out there for fun and to get some learning experience.”
Tomalty jumped out to a sizable lead early, with the novice skip making a cold draw for three in the first end.
A steal of one in the second made it 4-0 before Romyn got one back in the third.
With a single in the fourth and then a steal of two in the fifth, everyone in the rink figured Tomalty was home free—everyone, that is, except Tomalty herself.
“I wasn’t too confident, even at 7-1,” she conceded. “We’ve always had pretty close games with Cassidy.
“She can draw and hit.”
Tomalty’s concerns were validated when Romyn struck for three in the seventh, then had all her rocks in play while lying four in the eighth and final end.
“We were just planning to throw our rocks through and then hit theirs out, but that plan fell through,” Tomalty noted.
“With my first, I tried to get a hit on theirs but I missed,” she recalled.
“All Cassidy had to do was guard her four and she would have won.
“But her guard was heavy and slid behind the T-line,” Tomalty continued.
“We called time-out and our coach, Kim Beaudry, said I just had to draw on top of that rock and I was able to do it.”
Tomalty’s quartet opened play with an emphatic 13-2 win in seven ends over Ashley Payne of Fort Frances.
The game was tied 2-2 after three ends but a four-ender by Tomalty in the fourth led to steals of three, one, and three more in the next three ends to turn the nail-biter into a rout.
“We got some good guards up in the fourth and had our rocks buried so they couldn’t get at them,” Tomalty noted.
Romyn turned the tables on the locals with a 10-2, seven-end victory in Tomalty’s second game.
“We just kind of struggled with our weight throughout that game,” she explained.
Tomalty then found Payne much less agreeable to deal with in their second match-up.
After countering a Payne single with a four-ender in the second, Tomalty watched her Fort counterpart score one in the third and then zoom ahead with steals of three in the fourth and one in the fifth to go up 6-4.
“Ashley’s team was playing well and when we got down by two, our team was getting upset,” said Tomalty.
“But we told ourselves we just had to get our weight down to get back into it and it worked.”
Tomalty scored one in the sixth and then tied it with a steal of one in the seventh.
With Payne holding last rock, Tomalty had to squeak a shot through a narrow opening to be shot stone.
“It was curling a lot and I thought it was going to wreck, but it got through there by less than a hair,” described Tomalty, whose rock could not be dislodged by Payne to give her a 7-6 triumph.
Payne finished in third place with a 1-3 record—splitting her games with second-place Romyn (2-2) by earning a 7-2 win before falling 9-1 in five ends.
Meanwhile, local curling fans will have one of their own to cheer for at the Bantam boys’ provincial showdown here Feb. 5-8.
Chris Silver skipped his rink of third Myron Armstrong, second Daniel Vandenbrand, and lead Davis Jackson to second place at the Region 1 playdowns in Keewatin this past weekend.
Silver used four in the fifth to break a 2-2 tie and get past Jory King (Sioux Lookout) by a 6-4 count in the second-place tie-breaker to gain the final berth up for grabs.
Both rinks finished tied at 2-2 in the five-team event.
King beat Silver 7-4 in the opening game of the round-robin but the Fort team rebounded to edge Sagel Mercer (Sioux Lookout) 8-6.
Silver then thrashed Christopher Strom (Atikokan) by an 11-1 count in six ends.
But the tie-breaker was made necessary when Silver fell 8-4 by Isaiah Warkentin (Keewatin), who finished in first place with a 4-0 record.
