Player moves and retirements galore

Perennial New Brunswick champion skip Andrea Kelly is joining Northern Ontario’s Team Krista McCarville to form a five-player curling squad.

The move was revealed in the latest episode of the 2 Girls and a Game podcast, which is one of many curling podcasts that partner with The Curling News.

This eyeopener follows last weekend’s news of the Team Kelly breakup.

Kelly’s New Brunswick team finished 3-5 at February’s Scotties Tournament of Hearts in Kamloops and missed the playoffs.

A slightly different version of the team won bronze at the 2022 edition in Thunder Bay.

The 37-year-old Kelly joins a solid outfit that hasn’t experienced a lineup change since Kendra Lilly (age 31) joined in 2015.

McCarville (40), Ashley Sippala (36) and Sarah Potts (33) first played together in 2010.

Kelly will play third for McCarville, with Lilly, Sippala and Potts on a rotating front end.

Team McCarville coach Rick Lang was a recent guest on the From The Hack curling podcast, where he acknowledged the team was “certainly disappointed with our performance” in Kamloops.

The squad lost the semifinal to eventual champion Kerri Einarson.

The former members of Team Kelly are Sylvie Quillian, Jillian Brothers and Katie Forward.

Brothers is from Halifax, and is expected to form a new team based in Nova Scotia.

The news is just the latest in a wave of Canadian women’s and men’s curling player changes.

There is a change currently underway in Quebec, where the youthful Laurie St-Georges crew bade farewell to third Alannah Routledge.

St-Georges and Emily Riley are both 25, while lead Kelly Middaugh is 23. A replacement is expected to be announced as early as this week.

Team Suzanne Birt is no more, as the veteran skip from Prince Edward Island has called a stop to her on-ice career.

It’s the second such departure for Birt, who took two years off between 2016 and 2018 and, believe it or not, subsequently won an Atlantic Lottery prize of $500,000.

Former Birt teammate Sinead Dolan will also step back from the Roaring Game, while Meaghan Hughes will retire from competition. Marie Christianson and Michelle Shea are seeking new opportunities.

There is no word on where the members of the former Team Carey—Chelsea Carey, Jolene Campbell, Liz Fyfe and Rachel Erickson—will land.

The foursome was dispatched early in the Manitoba women’s provincial, and had mixed success on the World Curling Tour.

Jamie Sinclair, the former U.S. champion, rotated into the lineup for a couple of the team’s Grand Slam appearances.

Carey and Sinclair will play in one more event, sparing with Team Scheidegger at the Player’s Championship in Toronto.

That team announced their incoming split last week.

Skip Casey Scheidegger will step back from the sport, while Kate Hogan, Taylor McDonald and Jessie Scheidegger will seek future options.

Meanwhile, Team Rocque were one of the first women’s teams to announce their split back in early February.

Kelsey Rocque, Danielle Schmiemann and the former national champion front end of Dana Ferguson and Rachel Brown competed together for three years. 

The squad made it to a Grand Slam semifinal, qualified for the 2021 Canadian Olympic Trials and made it to the semi of the 2022 Alberta provincials. The missed the playoffs at this year’s provincial STOH with a 4-3 record.

The men’s side of Canadian curling has also been rife with changes.

The Reid Carruthers foursome started things early, shocking observers by jettisoning third Jason Gunnlaugson before Christmas.

Team Carruthers then played the January Grand Slam circuit with Brad Jacobs, whose previous Northern Ontario team was one of so many to split up a year ago.

Carruthers then returned to a three-player lineup which managed to “Gushue” its way through February’s Manitoba Tankard all the way to the final, where they lost to Matt Dunstone.

They finally added a fourth player, Robbie Gordon, for their wild card trip to the London Brier.

There was also an announcement that Jacobs would join Jordan Chandler’s young Northern Ontario squad for their Tankard run.

The Jacobs-Chandler combination lost in the playoffs to eventual champion Tanner Horgan.

Days after the Brier ended, Team Carruthers announced that Jacobs would join the team full-time for next season, at third position. 

The lineup will be in place at the last two Grand Slam stops in April and May.

Confused yet? There’s more.

Three men’s retirements bracketed the London Brier.

First, popular front-ender Colin Hodgson announced his retirement shortly before the event, which prompted this mid-Brier column from TCN’s Mike Fournier.

The day after the Brier final, Ryan Fry stepped away from Team Mike McEwen and the game.

Fry’s team had undergone a sudden change, too. After qualifying for the Ontario provincial, they dumped lead Jonathan Beuk. The announcement that Joe Hart—and his father Richard as coach—had joined the squad came just days before the Ontario Tankard started.

The rest is history. Team McEwen surprised onlookers to win the Tankard, then surprised again by putting in a strong Brier performance.

The third departure is Brad Thiessen, the second for team Kevin Koe, who is stepping back to spend more time with his young family.

Thiessen played for Brendan Bottcher for many years, and made the move to Team Koe with teammate Karrick Martin last spring.

Shortly after the Thiessen news dropped, new free agent Jacques Gauthier stepped in, presumably to play second stone next season.

Gauthier had previously announced the disbanding of his young B.C. team—made up of Sterling Middleton, Jason Ginter and Alex Horvath—which went 3-5 in their debut Brier appearance in London.