Miskew: Team Homan’s midseason snapshot
By Emma Miskew
It’s been quite the season for us so far, travelling all across Canada for events which started the first week of September and finished up in Yorkton, Sask., with the Pinty’s GSOC Canadian Open just before Christmas.
Since then, we’ve had an exciting month! We began our Christmas break by packing our bags once again … but this time with our shorts, sun hats and sunscreen as we headed off to Cancun for a little team R&R. We obviously travel a lot as a team, but had never taken a non-curling team trip somewhere hot! We ended up getting our resort upgraded just by pure luck and found ourselves at one of the most beautiful resorts in Mexico. We walked out back to a beautiful infinity pool overlooking the ocean, where we spent a lot of our time while we were there. We were also spoiled with the amazing restaurants that were available to us and the in-room butler service that we could use whenever we needed something. For our first vacation trip as a team, I’d say it was a great success!
We all got to spend some time with family and friends over Christmas, away from the rink and each other, to catch up with everyone and everything else! This was really important to us, knowing what our January was going to look like.
We kicked off the New Year with a pretty great trip out to Banff for the Skins game. Despite losing the semifinal on the Friday night, we were able to enjoy some quality time at a beautiful hotel in the mountains. Being from Ontario, we find the mountains to be spectacular and breathtaking. The views never get old; waking up to them every morning was absolutely wonderful! Given we weren’t playing any more games :(, we did some hiking in the mountains close to town, where we made it to the top of one of them. We didn’t stay there long because of the high winds, but were treated to such an amazing view that the hike up was definitely worth it!
The next stop for Team Homan was the Continental Cup in Las Vegas, where we were one of the six teams of Team North America competing against Team World. This is a unique event because in no other competition are we on the sidelines watching our opposition play and cheering them on when they make great shots. The camaraderie amongst the players makes the event a ton of fun to play in, and the pride that’s on the line for winning the competition brings out the competitive nature in everyone. This year we had to miss the Sunday games as we were heading back to Ontario for our provincials, but we watched and cheered from our hotel room and were very excited when Team North America won the super tight race to 30.5 points and the Continental Cup!
We finish the month of January in Brampton where we are competing in our provincial playdowns for the right to represent Ontario at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts this February. With all the great teams in our province, we’ll have to be focused and sharp!