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By Keaton Hills
Dominique Vivier and Brooklyn Ideson had been messaging each other for two years knowing that they wanted to eventually form a team together. Ideson says she had to wait awhile for Vivier to say yes, but then they found Sydney Anderson and Toula Pappas and officially formed Team Vivier.
In their first year together, the dream team from the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club won Curling Ontario’s U18 Women’s Provincial Championship in an intense extra-end final on Sunday at the RCMP Curling Club.
“Overall, I think we did a pretty good job, especially with nerves and a lot of stress,” said Vivier, whose teammates have hometowns of Greely, Peterborough and London. “Whenever you have finals the next day, you don’t sleep as well as you usually do, so you have a lot of outside factors that can impact the performance, but overall I’m really proud of how we played and how we stayed calm and we kept the pressure on the whole game and kept going.”
Team Vivier went 6-1 to top the round robin standings and earn a direct berth to the final, with their only loss coming to the Huntley Curling Club rink skipped by Katrina Frlan, who they’d meet again the championship game.
Trailing by one with hammer in the eighth and final end, Vivier had the chance to end the game with her last rock, but had to instead settle for a single. Her squad wound up stealing two in the extra end for the 7-5 victory.
Vivier, whose team is coached by Phil Mainville, was proud of how they persevered in the heat of the close final.
“I think I can speak for all of us when I say we were pretty down after I missed my draw in the eighth end. I don’t think it was the right time to miss a draw,” noted the first-year Wilfrid Laurier University student who also curls for the Golden Hawks. “But I think we just knew that we had to keep plugging and we knew we could finish it off well. We just needed another chance at it and we followed our plan the whole end and everybody made their shots.”
With the win, Team Vivier will now represent Ontario at the 2024 Canadian U18 Curling Championships, which their Ottawa Hunt club will host alongside the RA Curling Centre of Excellence from Feb. 5-10.
Vivier expected this will give them an advantage and added that it will be nice for them to have lots of friends and family be able to attend nationals.
Ideson, who’s relatively close to Vivier when she’s studying at Western University in London, is the daughter of three-time Paralympian Mark Ideson, a gold medallist in 2014 and bronze medallist in 2018 and 2022.
“It’s really cool to have him give us inspirational talks and have him on our side for these types of things,” Ideson said of her father, who was in attendance for the provincials. “We really appreciate him.”
Ontario has two entries in the U18 curling nationals, so a second final was played at the provincials to determine which other team would receive a nationals berth.
Team Frlan knocked off Ava Acres’ rink from the provincial-host RCMP club 5-3 in the semi-final to reach the first final, but lost the rematch in the second final 7-3.
Team Frlan were the defending Ontario champions, while Team Acres represented Ontario at last year’s Canada Winter Games, where they finished fifth. Lead Mya Sharpe, second Isabella McLean, third Aila Thompson and coach Gord Butler will join Acres for the nationals.
On the men’s side, Team Nicholls of the Rideau Curling Club scored five in the second end and three more in the second-to-last to plow past their opponents from Hamilton and claim the second Ontario men’s nationals berth.
Skip Owen Nicholls, third Tye McCutcheon, second Drew Zettler, lead Kole O’Connor and coach Sierra Sutherland went 5-2 in the round robin, won their semi-final 6-4 over Hamilton’s Team MacDougall, lost the first final 6-3 to Kitchener-Waterloo’s Team MacTavish, before winning the second final 10-5.
With local rinks claiming three of the four Ontario berths for the nationals, they’ve fulfilled the wish made by Ottawa curling legend Earle Morris, who’d noted earlier that championship events are always made more fun with a strong home team.
“It’s going to be wonderful,” Morris said when he was inducted into the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame this past fall. “Juniors bring all sorts of energy to the game and curling is always blessed with really great volunteers to bring the events to life.
“Hopefully we’ll have a good Ontario team and hopefully we’ll even have an Ottawa team that can represent us well.”
