Team Galusha will once again wear the territory’s colours at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts and they won the right to do so in rather dominating fashion.
Kerry Galusha and her rink of Jo-Ann Rizzo, Margot Flemming and Sarah Koltun will be off to the Canadian women’s curling championship in Calgary next month thanks to winning the NWT Women’s Curling Championship in Hay River on Sunday by beating Team Cormier out of Inuvik by a score of 8-3 in the final.
The Inuvik rink is better known as Team Wainman and skipped by Reese Wainman, but Yellowknife’s Sharon Cormier came on board to help the young team out for the event. Two Hay River rinks skipped by Betti Delorey and Deb Stanley rounded out the field.
Galusha said it was a strong performance from start to finish for her rink.
“We only gave up one deuce all weekend and a couple of steals,” she said. “We had hammer (last rock) in all of our games to start and we always start strong. We go after teams early and we had chances to score multiple points in almost every end.”
Galusha and company were never in trouble at all when you look at the scorelines in all of their games. The four teams played a double round-robin and Team Galusha won them all to earn a bye straight through to the final. Cormier and Delorey finished second and third respectively and ended up in the semifinal, which Cormier won, 11-3, to advance to the decider.
In the final, Team Galusha opened with a deuce in the first end to take an early 2-0 lead. They would steal one in the second and two more in the third to extend that lead to 5-0, before Cormier got a single back in the fourth. Team Galusha put up another deuce before the fifth-end break to go up, 7-1.
After the break, Team Galusha stole one to make it 8-1, which was followed by a single for Cormier in the seventh and a steal in the eighth, but Cormier decided to shake hands after that to give Team Galusha the win.
“The final was the longest game we had all weekend,” said Galusha. “We’re glad that other teams entered to play and that we got games to play. They all ended early, but it’s still good because we can work on what we need to and we prefer to play.”
With the ticket punched for Calgary, the focus now turns to what will be the swan song for this current line-up of Team Galusha.
Galusha said the ladies decided before the season began that this season would be it.
“It’s good that we all know so there’s no drama of ‘Are we staying together?’ or anything like that,” she said. “We’ve had a great last couple of years — we didn’t play that well on tour this season, but I’m hoping the eight spiels we played will pay off for us down there. We don’t know who we’re playing yet, but the field will be good.”