Athabasca will be represented in the Northern Alberta Curling Association (NACA)-hosted provincial competition at the Garson Curling Club in Edmonton in October by a women’s curling team.
Bev Topola, skip, Audrey Shapka, third, Shannon Demko, second, and Sherry Tebbenham, lead, will travel to Edmonton October 17–19.
The team qualified in the NACA Cup at the Ottewell Curling Club in Edmonton against 17 other teams March 28–30.
The team finished first in the B event.
“We will compete at the provincial level,” said skip Bev Topola.
The team will be unable to practice over the summer as the ice at the Athabasca Regional Multiplex has already been removed.
“Some clubs have their ice earlier. Our club starts curling in the third week of October,” she said. “Virtually, we will have no practice before we go, but just about everyone is in the same boat.”
When the team competed in the NACA Cup, their expectation was to do their best. The competition was a double knockout, which means if a team loses two games, they are eliminated.
“We lost our first game on Friday,” Topola said, “which meant that our next loss, we were out. We won our next four games.”
Topola stated the whole event was very exciting.
“Our team just played really, really well,” she said. “We never got ahead of ourselves. We went in with the expectation of curling the best that we can curl. We cannot control the outcome of the game. If we can curl as good as we can curl, that is all we can do.”
She went on to explain all the games were really close.
“There were a lot of really good shots. Even the scores in our games — it doesn’t indicate the intensity and closeness of the game. If you miss a couple at wrong times, you’ll lose the game.”
The team made the key shots at the right times.
“It was a lot of fun,” she said.
This women’s curling team was chosen to attend the NACA Cup because they were last year’s league winners.
“Typically, it is the league winner from the year before, because by the time you have to enter, you don’t know the current year winner,” she said. “We won the league the last few years; our team had the opportunity to go.”
