The look of wide-eyed amazement on Kesa Van Osch’s face said it all when the 22-year-old skip realized she had just beaten veteran Kelly Scott to win the Scotties B.C. Women’s Curling Championship on Sunday night in Prince George.
With the score locked at 4-4 playing the 10th end of the championship final, Van Osch’s Victoria Curling Centre team of third Stephanie Baier, second Jessie Sanderson and lead Carley Sandwith needed to steal a trip to the Canadian Scotties, Feb. 1-9 at Montreal’s Maurice Richard Arena.
They played a perfect end, and with her last rock, Van Osch calmly drew behind a tight guard, and the sweepers took it right onto the heart at the top of the button. Left with a near-impossible shot, Scott needed nearly full button to win, and came up light.
“I told myself this is just a regular draw, just a draw to the four-foot,” Van Osch said about her make-it-or-break-it attempt. “I let it go, and let the sweepers and third take it from there.”
Van Osch, who’s from Nanaimo, but plays with Coquitlam’s Sanderson and Victorians Baier and Sandwith in the VCC Select League, is the first Vancouver Island women’s team to advance to the national stage since Pat Sanders in 1999. Her team joins her sister Kalia Van Osch’s junior squad from Nanaimo, and the Cameron de Jong junior team from VCC/Juan de Fuca for an unprecedented three-team sweep of B.C. crowns in the women’s and junior divisions.
Just two years away from her B.C. junior championship win, Van Osch was a total underdog against Scott, a winner of six women’s provincials, two Canadians and a world championship. Van Osch defeated Scott 6-3 in the final draw of the round-robin to finish in first place, but Scott prevailed in the one/two Page playoff game. Scott downed Van Osch 8-6, and the Victoria team then defeated Abbotsford’s Allison MacInnes 10-2 in a semifinal. Including tiebreakers, it was MacInnes’s sixth game in two days.
In the final, Scott got control early, taking advantage of some Van Osch nerves to draw for two in the first end. But in a strategy difficult to fathom, Scott didn’t use her team’s vast expertise to take it to the young players. Instead, the Kelowna group stuck to an ultra-conservative approach, and eventually got burned.
“I was surprised,” Van Osch coach Cindy Tucker said. “There were some centre guards I thought she’d go around, and she’d hit.”
Down 3-2, Van Osch had a chance for two, but had to settle for one. Her team, however, wasn’t particularly rattled.
“I, personally, was quite relaxed most of the game,” Van Osch said. “Win or lose, we were very proud of what we’d done.”
The sixth was blanked, and Scott was forced into a single in the seventh end. It was exactly the strategy team Van Osch was hoping to execute. Defensively minded, they were happy keeping things close, and created a deuce to tie things in the eighth end.
“All of our games this season have been tight battles, and we’re a second-half team,” Baier said, adding the team did plenty of “self-talk” as the game came down to the wire. “When we forced her to score in the seventh, that’s when I knew we had a shot at being successful. We had a glimmer.”
Scott blanked the ninth, and it all came down to the last rocks of the 10th end.
“We thought, ‘We can do this,’ ” Van Osch said.
Tucker was on the Sanders team that won B.C. title in ’99, and she said it’s a whole new game now, with wide television coverage and a big-event feel. It’s also a game being taken over by a fresh new generation. Besides Van Osch, the field for the national Scotties includes rookies Sarah Koltun of the Yukon, who will also skip a team at the national juniors, Manitoba’s Chelsea Carey and Ontario’s Allison Flaxey. Up-and-comer Val Sweeting took Alberta, joining veterans Heather Strong of Newfoundland/Labrador, Andrea Crawford of New Brunswick, Saskatchewan’s Stefanie Lawton and Kim Dolan of P.E.I. Ontario’s Rachael Homan returns as defending champion, and the Quebec rep is still to be decided.
