[ritchiebaby]

Yesterday saw the start of these Championships in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. There are 13 teams competing - Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland and USA. The round-robin games will be completed on Friday 23 March and, apparently to accommodate the unusual number of entries, there will be 2 additional games before the Semi-finals. The first 2 will automatically qualify for the Semi-finals, but 3rd place will play 6th place and 4th place will play 5th place to decide the other 2 Semi-finalists. (I don't really know why the organisers have to make things complicated, but they obviously feel the need to justify their existence - and huge expense accounts!) The Medal matches will take place on Sunday 25 March.


Scotland are represented by Alternate Sophie Jackson, Lead Vicky Wright (Vice-skip), Second Alice Spence, Third Jennifer Dodds and Skip Hannah Fleming, who are coached by Nancy Smith. They are a fairly inexperienced team at the top level who defeated Eve Muirhead's team in a play-off to determine Scotland's representatives, although Fleming was Junior World Champion in 2012.

Their inexperience showed in their first 3 games - losing to Russia 4-8, to Italy 6-7 after an extra end and to USA 6-8. Tomorrow they play Czech Republic and Switzerland, then Germany and Canada on Tuesday.