Joey Payeur
It’s a little over 7,000 km from where it all began for Trevor Bonot and Jackie McCormick to where they’re heading next fall.
Getting the chance to experience the trip together is something they wouldn’t have any other way.
The brother-and-sister skip-third combination, who were born and raised in Stratton, joined Thunder Bay spouses Kory Carr (second) and Megan Carr (lead) in leading Northern Ontario to the 2017 Canadian mixed curling championship in Yarmouth, N.S. with a 5-2 victory over Manitoba in Saturday’s final.
With a storyline that perhaps only could be found in the sport of curling, Bonot and McCormick will complete an incredible journey from a town of less than 500 people to an idyllic community nestled in the shadow of the Swiss Alps.
That would be Champéry, Switzerland, where Northern Ontario will represent Canada at the 2017 world mixed curling championship next Oct. 6-14.
“It’s pretty exciting coming from a little wee town that nobody knows about,” enthused McCormick, who operates the Fort Frances Enhanced Hearing Centre but still makes her home in Stratton.
“This is definitely the highlight of my curling career to get to do this with my brother.”
Bonot still was absorbing the enormity of what Northern Ontario had accomplished when contacted Sunday while sitting with his team in the parking garage of the Halifax airport before their flight home.
“It’s pretty crazy,” mused the current Thunder Bay resident, who also received the male sportsmanship award for the week as voted on by the players.
“You go through a lot of games and different teammates,” he noted.
“You have to be patient,” stressed Bonot, who is the first skip to lead Northern Ontario to the national mixed title since Chris Johnson back in 1997.
“But the last [eight] months since we decided to play together as a team has been a great ride.”
Northern Ontario went 8-2 during the week that left them tied for second in the championship pool with Saskatchewan.
A 7-4 win over New Brunswick in their final game Friday prevented a three-way tie between Northern Ontario, New Brunswick, and Manitoba.
Then in the semi-finals earlier Saturday, Northern Ontario scored back-to-back deuces in the second and third ends to open a 4-1 lead on Saskatchewan.
Skip Brady Scharback made it close at the end, but with Kory Carr (97 percent) and Bonot (93 percent) leading the way shot-wise, Northern Ontario hung on for a 5-4 victory.
An outside observer might have believed Manitoba’s 4-2 win over previously undefeated Ontario in the other semi-final would have represented a good stroke of luck for Bonot & Co.
Not so, said Bonot.
“Manitoba was really the big dog here,” he stressed.
“You’re going up against a two-time Canadian junior champion and the 2015 world junior champ [Braden Calvert] and the top-ranked female in Manitoba [defending provincial women’s champ in third Kerri Einarson], who were No. 1 on the back end all week,” Bonot noted.
“The Manitoba team is friends of ours and we talked the night before with them that this is what we wanted to do: win each of our semis and meet in the final,” he added.
It was a defensive showdown through the first four ends of the final, with Northern Ontario getting a single in the second, followed by a Manitoba single in the fourth.
Then staring at Manitoba stones lying first and third shot in the fifth, Bonot decided to put his team’s collective heads together before firing the last rock.
“We knew what was going to happen,” he recounted. “We had a team discussion before the shot on how we wanted to play it.
“We saw the opportunity for four.”
Bonot didn’t hold back on the out-turn hit and sent Manitoba rocks scurrying every direction to score a four-ender that put them up 5-1.
Calvert blanked the sixth but only managed a single in the seventh. Bonot then ran him out of rocks in the eighth.
For Kory and Megan Carr, it was an extended honeymoon the newlyweds won’t soon forget.
“We just wanted to go and have fun together being able to go to this nationals trip out east,” said Kory.
“We curled very steady as a team and improved during the week, and to win it is great, especially with my wife.”
Megan, playing lead competitively for only her second year, had a candid take on her role with the team.
“It’s just a matter of concentrating on what I have to do and try not to screw things up for the rest of the team,” she joked, eliciting a roar of laughter from her teammates listening into her response.
McCormick said there wasn’t one particular game that had Northern Ontario convinced it was a serious title contender.
“We just took it one game at a time and quietly went about our business,” she remarked.
“We were not on the TV [broadcast] sheet at all until the championship round,” McCormick noted.
“We stayed out of everyone else’s view and just played very consistently, minus the game against Ontario [a 9-0 loss Friday morning].”
With three-quarters of the new champions hailing from the Port Arthur Curling Club (McCormick being the lone exception), that facility will sport the national banner.
“Maybe we can take a nice picture of it and frame it for the club back home in Stratton,” chuckled Bonot.
“Or get a little replica one made up to hang there,” McCormick grinned.
Their Swiss excursion is almost a full year away, but both Bonot and McCormick already have their sights set on conquering the world.
“We’re confident in our abilities and I think we can have a good run there,” said Bonot.
Besides, chimed in McCormick, “Winning Canadians in curling is a lot different and a lot tougher than most anywhere else in the world.”
“There’s not a lot of countries that have the level of competition we have here, so we’ll be more prepared for facing other teams at the worlds,” she reasoned.
