ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Newfoundland and Labrador, represented by a St. John’s rink skipped by Cory Schuh, is advancing to the championship pool, the next phase of the 2020 Canadian mixed curling championship in Saguenay, Que.
Schuh’s team, which includes third Erin Porter, Andrew Taylor and Brooke Godsland, improved its record to 4-2, good for second place in the pool, with a 9-3 win over Nunavut on Wednesday afternoon and a loss to the Northwest Territories in the evening draw.
They'll take on SManitba and British Columbia in the opening matches of the championship pool today and take on Quebec and New Brunswick tomorrow.
The 14 teams in the event (10 provinces, three territories and Northern Ontario) are divided into seven-team pools. At the end of the preliminary round robin, the top four finishers in each pool advance to the championship round, where teams play the four advancing teams from the opposite pool.
Heading Wednesday night, there were four teams with 3-2 records in Pool A, but since two of those teams (Alberta and Saskatchewan) were to play each other in the final draw, Newfoundland was guaranteed a top-four finish, no matter the result of the matchup against Jamie Koe’s NWT rink.
That doesn’t mean a win in that game wasn’t important as teams carry forward their full win-loss records from preliminary play to the championship pool.
At the conclusion of championship pool play, the top four finishers will participate in Saturday morning semifinals (1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3) , which will determine the teams in the gold-medal game Saturday afternoon.
The winner of that final will represent Canada at the 2020 world mixed championship next October at a location that hasn’t yet been announced. Canada will be in pursuit of a third consecutive world title.
This are considered the 2020 Canadian mixed championship, because it is the first national event of the 2019-20 curling season, when almost all the Canadian titles will be decided in 2020.
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