Team Homan splits Thursday games at Pan Continental Championships

VIRGINIA, Minn. — Any team with aspirations of greatness knows it must find ways to win in all kinds of games.

Team Rachel Homan’s ambitions are well-chronicled, of course, and along with those ambitions comes the experience to know that not every victory will come easily.

Thursday at the 2025 United States Steel Pan Continental Curling Championships, Homan, vice-skip Tracy Fleury, second Emma Miskew, lead Sarah Wilkes, alternate Rachelle Brown, and coaches Renee Sonnenberg and Viktor Kjell were in all out grind mode.

It worked in the morning draw, as the two-time reigning Canadian and World champs from Ottawa rallied from giving up an early four to South Korea’s Team Eunji Gim and gutted out an 11-9 win.

But in the evening session, the Canadians came up just short as China’s Team Rui Wang scored two in the 10th end for a 7-6 victory.

The victory clinched a semifinal berth for the Chinese, who improved to a perfect 5-0.

Canada, meanwhile, dropped to 3-2 and still firmly in the playoff hunt.

All the teams were greeted with new conditions at the Iron Trail Motors Event Center in Virginia, Minn., after World Curling ice technicians textured the stones late Wednesday night, and it took Canada some time to adjust.

“I thought we made a lot of mistakes,” said Homan. “We tried to puzzle it out, and we moved a couple of rocks around that fooled the sweepers. That really cost us. But once we had the rocks in the right spots, I think we drastically improved our percentages. We just kept trying to stick together and try to make the next one.”

One of those mistakes was particularly costly as Homan’s final stone of the second end came up light, despite the team believing it had the necessary weight upon release. That allowed Gim to make a draw to backing for the four-ender.

But Homan responded with a classic skip’s deuce in the third, setting it up with a perfect freeze on her first stone, and the comeback was on.

“We just wanted to stay tough,” said Miskew. “With the way that it was a bit of a new surface with those (freshly textured) rocks, we thought that if we just put some pressure on, just put our rocks in good spots, that we could get a couple mistakes. You don’t have to catch up all in one end. You can do it slowly. I thought we did a decent job at that.”

Canada took its first lead in the sixth. An end earlier, Homan made a wonderful short angle-tap raise to score a pair and tie the game 5-5, and then stole a deuce in the sixth when Gim was heavy on her last-rock draw.

After South Korea retook the lead with three in the seventh, the Canadians fought back immediately in the eighth with three of their own, finished off by Homan’s angle tap, followed by a crucial steal of one in the ninth that essentially put the game out of reach.

“I think we were throwing really well, and the rocks fooled us,” said Homan. “So we just kept throwing the same, and then made more shots, and we knew that we would play better as we figured out how to throw them.”

Team Homan has just a single game on the docket on Friday, at 3 p.m. (all times Eastern) against Australia’s Team Helen Williams (2-3), and will clinch a playoff spot with a victory.

The top four teams after round-robin play will advance to the semifinals, which are set for Saturday at 8 p.m.

Team Tabitha Peterson also qualified for the playoffs after beating Australia 11-5 and sits tied for first place in the round robin with China.

Team Brad Jacobs, meanwhile will wrap up round-robin play on Friday with games at 10 a.m. against Japan’s Team Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi (4-1) followed by a hotly anticipated showdown with Team John Shuster of the United States (5-0) in a game that could decide first place in the round robin and last-rock advantage through the playoffs.

Team Jacobs clinched a berth in the semifinal earlier in the day with an 8-2 win over Australia’s Team Hugh Millikin.

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/