Team Homan splits opening day at Pan Continental Championships

VIRGINIA, Minn. — Fresh off winning a record 19th Grand Slam title Sunday in Nisku, Alta., Team Rachel Homan immediately embarked on a long cross-country trip that involved two flights and a three-hour drive to get to Virginia, Minn.

They arrived Monday afternoon, shortly before their assigned practice time for the 2025 United States Steel Pan Continental Curling Championships.

And Tuesday morning, it’s only natural that the schedule finally caught up with Homan, vice-skip Tracy Fleury, second Emma Miskew, lead Sarah Wilkes, alternate Rachelle Brown, coaches Renee Sonnenberg and Viktor Kjell.

The two-time defending Canadian and world champions from Ottawa bowed 11-5 to Japan’s Team Satsuki Fujisawa in their opening game at the Iron Trail Motors Event Center in Virginia, Minn.

“Not the performance we were hoping for,” admitted Fleury. “But we’ll have a good debrief and learn from it and I’m sure we’ll bounce back fine.

“We’ll probably sneak in a little nap between, for sure,” she added with a smile.

The nap clearly paid off later Tuesday as Canada hit the win column with an emphatic 10-2 win over New Zealand’s Team Bridget Becker (0-2).

Canada, which inserted Brown into the lineup to give Miskew a break after a long few days of curling and travel, opened the game with steals of three in each of the first, second and third ends and never looked back.

“We played a really good game and it was a nice bounce-back win for us,” said Homan. “We learned a bunch about the ice and had to make some tweaks (for the night game). It’s straighter here than we anticipated so we just made a few tweaks to make some more shots out there tonight.”

Coming off Sunday’s record-setting victory at the CO-OP Tour Challenge in Alberta and then making the trip to Northern Minnesota, Team Homan knew there would be accompanying challenges, but looked at Tuesday morning’s loss as a chance to learn for later in the week.

“You get used to certain ice conditions at the event before and then you have to quickly adjust to new ice conditions,” she said. “The ice was a little bit straighter than we were used to last week but we’ll learn it.”

Japan controlled the game from the get-go, getting a deuce in the first and holding Canada to one in the second after Fujisawa made a brilliant hit and roll buried behind a corner guard.

In the third, Japan’s rock placement was near perfect, and it paid off with Fujisawa making a hit to score five.

Team Homan would fight back with a three in the fourth on a draw from the skipper, but that was as close as the reigning Pan Continental champions would get.

“They’re (Japan) a good team, and we weren’t as sharp as we wanted to be,” said Homan. “But we learned a lot about the rocks and ice during that game. We’ll talk about it this afternoon and we’ll be ready to go tonight.”

“Lots of games left,” added Fleury. “This is the point in the week where you want to learn the ice and rocks, so we won’t get too rattled about it.”

The Canadian women will get a chance to sleep in on Wednesday morning before a 3 p.m. (all times Eastern) tilt against Mexico’s Team Adriana Camarena (0-2)

In other Tuesday morning games, Team Tabitha Peterson of the United States turned back Mexico’s Team Adriana Camarena 11-3; Australia’s Team Helen Williams rallied from an early 3-0 deficit to knock off rivals New Zealand 11-5; and China’s Rui Wang shaded South Korea’s Eunji Gim 6-5 in an extra end.

Scores, standings and full team lineups are available by CLICKING HERE.

All games will be available on World Curling’s streaming platform, The Curling Channel.

This story will be posted in French as soon as possible at www.curling.ca/fr/nouvelles-media/