Scotties draw

Pools and draw announced for 2021 Scotties

Feb 2, 2021 | 12:58 PM

KAMLOOPS — The draw has been announced for the 2021 Scotties – the Canadian Women’s Curling Championship.

The 18 teams will play in two pools of nine each — a round robin followed by playoffs.

The Corryn Brown rink from Kamloops, representing B.C., will play in a pool that includes Manitoba’s Jennifer Jones, wild-card Tracy Fleury from Manitoba, Saskatchewan’s Sherry Anderson, along with PEI, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nunavut and Newfoundland/Labrador.

B.C. will open on February 20 against Quebec’s Laurie St-Georges, before meeting Jennifer Jones in the second draw.

The wild-card rink under Tracy Fleury’s name, will be skipped by two time Scotties champion Chelsea Carey.

Fleury will skip the Scotties to stay home with her infant daughter, who was born last July and diagnosed with a rare form of epilepsy, called infantile spasm’s.

The 18-rinks will play a full round robin within their respective pools, and then the top four teams in each pool will move on to the Championship Pool, and play four more games against the teams from the other pool.

Their preliminary pool records will be carried forward.

From there, the top three teams will make the playoffs; the first-place team after the Championship Pool will go straight to the gold-medal game (Feb. 28), while the second- and third-place teams will meet in the semifinal earlier that day.

The familiar four-team Page Playoff format couldn’t be used because it takes two extra draws, and with the field expansion, there wasn’t time available in the schedule, and it would have forced teams to play more games in a limited amount of time.