Laura Crocker’s young rink of Sarah Wilkes, Rebecca Pattison and Jen Gates managed to do what much more accomplished Alberta curlers like Kevin Martin, Kevin Koe and Heather Nedohin couldn’t do Saturday morning.
She won a tiebreaker to advance to the Players’ Championship quarter-finals in Toronto.
A steal of three in the fourth end was the difference for Crocker, who won two Canadian Interuniversity Sport championships with Wilkes and Gates at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., in 2011 and 2012, before moving to Edmonton last summer to train at the Saville Centre. She didn’t have the hammer to start her tiebreaker, but took a 5-2 lead with the steal en route to a 6-4 victory over Winnipeg’s Chelsea Carey.
Crocker, who upset Sherri Middaugh of Coldwater, Ont., and Winnipeg’s Jennifer Jones in her final two round-robin games Friday to make the tiebreakers, saw her three-game winning streak snapped in the quarter-finals, when Sweden’s Margaretha Sigfridsson jumped out to a 5-1 lead after three ends and cruised to an 8-3 victory. Sigfridsson lost this year’s world women’s championship final to Scotland’s Eve Muirhead, who scored three points in the 10th end for 7-5 victory.
Meanwhile, Nedohin and her 2012 Canadian women’s championship rink of Beth Iskiw, Jessica Mair and Laine Peters had a 3-0 lead after four ends of her tiebreaker before giving up two in the fifth end, three in seven and a steal of one in eight to lose 6-4 to Moscow’s Anna Sidorova.
The other women’s quarter-final results were: Muirhead defeating Grande Prairie’s Renee Sonnenberg 8-6, scoring three in the sixth end to break a 4-4 tie; Saskatoon’s Stefanie Lawton edging Sidorova 8-7 in an extra end; and Jones downing Canadian champion Rachel Homan of Ottawa 6-5.
In the men’s tiebreakers, John Epping of Toronto scored a pair of three-enders late in the game to upset Martin 7-3; Brad Gushue of St. John’s, N.L., scored three in the seventh end to break a 3-3 tie and double up Koe 6-3; and recently crowned world champ Niklas Edin of Sweden lost 8-4 to Jim Cotter of Kelowna/Vernon, B.C.
That makes the men’s quarter-finals at 1 p.m. MDT (televised on CBC) as Coldwater, Ont.’s Glenn Howard, the only undefeated team in the competition, vs. Gushue; Canadian champion Brad Jacobs of Sault Ste. Marie vs. Norway’s Thomas Ulsrud (with Edmonton’s Dave Nedohin playing third); Winnipeg’s Mike McEwen vs Epping; and Winnipeg’s Jeff Stoughton vs. Cotter.
The men’s and women’s semifinals will be televised on Sportsnet at 5:30 p.m. MDT.
