'We have to play better': Rachel Homan not satisfied after playoff berth

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Rachel Homan has lived with this before … having that target on her back at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts.

You know the one …

That maple leaf proudly worn by the defending queens of the Canadian women’s curling championship.
It never gets old, though.

And Homan herself seems never to be completely satisfied until the final rock — with a win attached to it — is settled, a big reason why she’s been the juggernaut of the last two seasons and a favourite — again — to win the 2025 Scotties in Thunder Bay, Ont.

“We have to play better … to make sure that we’re in the final Sunday,” said Homan, ever serious about the task at hand and holding choice of stones and last rock through every game of the playoffs.

“It’s exciting — absolutely,” continued the Ottawa skip. “And knowing that we now know that we have rocks and hammer kind of in our control is really comforting.”

It’s just further proof these Scotties were billed as Homan’s to lose.

After all, the defending queen and her knights from Ottawa swept through last year’s Scotties in Calgary and followed with an eye-popping 45-4 record ahead of this winter’s Canadian women’s curling championship.

And they’ve kept it up in T-Bay with another unbeaten run, making it 20 straight wins in Scotties action since the start of the 2024 event.

Included was Friday afternoon’s win over Nova Scotia’s Christina Black — 10-5 — in the 1-v-2 qualifier to push them onward to Saturday’s 1-v-2 Page playoff game (7 p.m. ET).

Has the class team wearing Canada’s colours got a couple more in them to make it another clean sweep?
We all know the answer to that — they are a juggernaut and likely winners at the end of this thing.

Even a loss before the final at this point will only likely serve to fire up Homan, third Tracy Fleury, second Emma Miskew and lead Sarah Wilkes even more. So it’ll likely take an off-day for them combined with an Herculean effort from the challenger in Sunday’s final to keep them from their appointed triumph.

“We try not to think about the streaks too much,” Miskew said. “Everybody was talking about it, and we’re like, ‘We don’t care — we don’t want it to be the final that ends it our streak!’ So we don’t really think about it too much. We’re trying to go out there with the same intensity every game.”

“At the end of the day, we’ve got to win two more games,” added Homan. “However that happens, that’s our focus. It’s staying in the moment, trying to learn and get better every end.”

EINARSON EARNS BYE, TOO

Homan now gets Manitoba’s Kerri Einarson in Saturday evening’s 1-v.-2 Page playoff game for a spot in Sunday’s championship final (7 p.m. ET).

That’s after earning a victory in a closer-than-it-looked-on-the-scoreboard victory — 7-4 — over Alberta’s Kayla Skrlik in their 1-v-2 qualifier Friday afternoon.

“Team Homan is a great team,” Einarson said. “They’re very strong, and they’ve had a really great couple of seasons.

“We’re a new team, but we’re excited for it. And we played them a couple times this season — going 1-1, I think. But it’s going to be a great game. We’re just going to focus on what we can control and put some focus on them.”

Einarson is the only Canadian team to have triumphed over Homan this season.

“Just got to play well and put some pressure on them,” said the energetic skip from Selkirk, Man. “It looks like they (struggled Friday), so maybe we can take advantage of that moving forward.”

The winner of Homan-Einarson gains a coveted spot in Sunday’s championship finale.

“That would be amazing,” Einarson said. “But we’re going to just focus on ourselves, take it one rock at a time, and see what happens.”

There’s no doubt Einarson, third Val Sweeting, second Karlee Burgess and lead Krysten Karwacki look more comfortable in the last few days.

Midway through the week, the Gimli Curling Club crew looked like a hot mess — at least in comparison to its championship standards of four straight Scotties crowns captured from 2020-23.

Somehow they rallied one end at a time to avoid key losses and get back into fighting form — credit the superstar skip for some massive hot-shots made — and here they are on what looks to be a collision course with Homan in a bid to regain the throne.

Yes, Einarson & Co. have settled down enough to put themselves into that No. 1 contenders spot for the title.

And they have the talent from top to bottom in their lineup to do just that.

“I think we’re in a really good spot — a really good mind-set,” said Einarson, whose charges certainly looked closer to championship worth than they have all week in the tight triumph over Skrlik.

“We were just calm out there and maybe not getting too much rocks in play and not going too hard for it, but also, they kept it pretty clean, too,” continued Einarson, who turned the game by counting three in the ninth end after forcing the Alberta skip to make difficult decisions.

“They guarded, and I was like, ‘We might as well go for it.’ It was, ‘Let’s go for a couple here.’ And they were left with a very difficult shot on her first and on her last.”

“We went out there firing, and we played really well. We took advantage of opportunities, so we’ll carry all that moving forward.

“It’s definitely a confidence booster. And we get a little more rest between games.”

EXTRA ENDS

With the losses earlier in the day, Skrlik and Black dropped to the 3-v-4 elimination games to play Ontario’s Danielle Inglis and B.C.’s Corryn Brown respectively late Friday … Black’s Nova Scotia eliminated B.C.’s Brown 10-5, while Skrlik and Alberta took out Inglis 9-8 to send Ontario home … Black and Skrlik will move on to play each other in elimination game tomorrow morning … Sunday wraps up the Scotties with the mid-day semifinal (1 p.m. ET) and the championship draw (7 p.m. ET) … The Scotties award winners for the week were announced Friday: The Robin Wilson first-team all-stars are skip Rachel Homan (Canada), third Tracy Fleury (Canada), second Sarah Koltun (B.C), and lead Samantha Fisher (B.C.); the second-team all-stars are skip Laurie St-Georges (Quebec); third Val Sweeting (Manitoba-Einarson); second Jocelyn Peterman (Manitoba-Lawes); and lead Krysten Karwacki (Manitoba-Einarson); the Marj Mitchell Sportsmanship Award winner is skip Nancy Martin (Saskatchewan).

tsaelhof@postmedia.com