The first Pan Continental Curling Championships will be held in Calgary, Alberta, from October 31 to November 6, 2022, at the Markin MacPhail Centre at Canada Olympic Park. The competition will be used to choose teams for the World Curling Championships in 2023. For both men’s and women’s events, there will be an A Division and a B Division. This new event combines the Pacific-Asia Curling Championships and America’s Challenge.
The top four men’s teams in the A Division will qualify for the 2023 World Men’s Curling Championship in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, which will be hosted by Canada. In the next year, the poorest finisher in the men’s A Division will be demoted to the B Division. The winner of the B Division will be promoted to the A Division in the following year’s competition.
Pan Continental Curling Championships How to watch:
A selection of games from the Pan Continental Curling Championships 2022 will be televised on World Curling TV. The Curling Channel, as well as channels in Canada, Japan, and Korea, will show the games listed below.
Aside from these fully produced events, all A-Division games will be live-streamed on The Curling Channel. These games can be viewed here.
Pan Continental Curling Championships Schedule:
Here’s a handy link to the schedule for the 2022 Pan Continental Curling Championships.
Pan Continental Curling Championships 2022
2022 Pan Continental Curling Championships Preview:
The top five female teams in the A Division will advance to the World Women’s Curling Championship in Sandviken, Sweden, in 2023. Because Australia was unable to compete in the 2021 Pacific-Asian Curling Championships, the bottom two finishers in this year’s women’s A Division will be demoted to the B Division the following year. The winner of the B Division will be promoted to the A Division in the following year’s competition.
The Chinese men’s and women’s teams withdrew from this competition on October 5th, promoting Kazakhstan’s men’s team and Chinese Taipei’s women’s team to A Division. On October 10th, it was stated that a mistake in the ranking system had been discovered, and therefore Australia’s men’s team and New Zealand’s women’s team should be promoted to A Division rather than Kazakhstan’s men’s team and Chinese Taipei’s women’s team.
This season, a new path to the women’s and men’s world curling championships begins with the inaugural 2022 Pan Continental Curling Championships, which begin this Monday at the WinSport Event Centre in Calgary.
This new event will determine which countries (but not which competing teams) from the Americas, Asia, and Pacific regions will compete in the 2023 LGT World Women’s Curling Championship (March 18-26 in Sandviken, Sweden) and the 2023 BKT Tires & OK Tire World Men’s Curling Championship (March 18-26 in Sandviken, Sweden) (April 1-9 in Ottawa). There are five slots available in both the women’s and men’s divisions.
Team Kerri Einarson (Gimli, Man.) of Canada expects to build on a bronze-medal result at the 2022 BKT Tires & OK Tire World Women’s Curling Championship in Prince George, B.C., last season. Einarson, Val Sweeting, Shannon Birchard, Briane Harris, Rachel Brown, and coach Reid Carruthers will compete against a nine-team field.
On Halloween Monday, the women begin the round-robin schedule with the first of many historic moments. At 9 a.m. (all hours MT), Team Canada will face New Zealand’s Jessica Smith, marking the first time in history that a Canadian team will face a New Zealand team in a World Curling Federation-sanctioned tournament. It will also be the first time that the Canadian women will compete against teams from Australia (Team Jennifer Westhagen), Brazil (Team Isis Oliveira), Hong Kong (Team Ling-Yue Hung), and Kazakhstan (Team Angelina Ebauyer).
Some familiar competitors are also in the mix for the Canadian ladies to beat during the event, which runs from Monday to November 6. Japan’s 2022 Olympic silver medalist Team Satsuki Fujisawa is in Calgary, seeking for a position in the forthcoming world competition.
South Korea won a silver medal at the 2022 global women’s championship, and while Team EunJung Kim will not compete in Calgary, the country will send a youthful and skilled team lead by 2020 world junior silver medalist Seungyoung Ha.
There will also be a North American combat, with Team Einarson taking on Team Tabitha Peterson of the United States. Peterson qualified for the world championship playoffs last season and won bronze in 2021.
To qualify a Canadian women’s team for the 2023 World Championship, Canada must finish in the top five.
On the men’s side, Team Brad Gushue (St. John’s, N.L.) is not under the same amount of pressure because Canada has already been qualified to host the 2023 World Men’s Championship. However, pride and avoiding relegation to the B Division for Canada next season remain on the line. A seven-game round-robin format pits eight clubs against each other.
Gushue, vice-skip Mark Nichols, second E.J. Harnden, lead Geoff Walker, and coach Jules Owchar all donned the Maple Leaf at the World Men’s Championships in Las Vegas last year (Harnden as an alternate) and are looking to have a successful week at the Pan Continental.
As an alternate, the team will bring an up-and-coming curler. Nathan Young, the gold medalist in mixed doubles at the 2020 Youth Olympic Games and the skipper of Newfoundland and Labrador at the 2022 Tim Hortons Brier, will join the team. Young is taking advantage of the opportunity to learn from one of the top curling teams in the world as he chases his own curling goals.
On Monday at 2 p.m., Team Gushue will face Team Korey Dropkin of the United States. When the skips faced off against each other at the world men’s championships last season, Team Canada won in the semifinals en way to a silver medal. Gushue and Dropkin have faced off once this season, with Gushue emerging victorious.
The Canadian men’s schedule also includes games against Team Jay Merchant of Australia, Team Marcelo Cabral De Mello of Brazil, Team Randolph Shen of Chinese Taipei, Team Riku Yanagisawa of Japan, Team Anton Hood of New Zealand, and Team ByeongJin Jeong of South Korea.
The top four finishers following round-robin play will proceed to Saturday’s semifinals. The men’s gold-medal game is slated for 9 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 6, while the bronze-medal game is set for 6 p.m. on Nov. 5.
The women’s gold-medal game is scheduled for Nov. 6 at 6 p.m., followed by the bronze-medal game at 1 p.m.
Curling Canada’s long-time Season of Champions media partners, TSN and RDS, will show selected games from the Pan Continental Championships.
The Pan Continental B Division Championships will be place at nearby Arena B alongside the A Division action. The men’s and women’s B Division champions will progress to the A Division for the 2023 Pan Continental Championships, while the A Division’s last-place men’s and women’s finishers will descend to the B Division.
Subject to capacity constraints, B Division draws will be free to view in Arena B. Women’s teams from Chinese Taipei, Kenya, Mexico, and Nigeria will compete. Guyana, Hong Kong, India, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are among the men’s competitors.
Many notable Canadian curlers are coaching for many of the nations competing in both divisions next week, including Amélie Blais (Brazil men), J.D. Lind (Japan women), Al Moore (Kazakhstan women), Darren Moulding (India men), Cathy Overton-Clapham (United States women), Nadine Scotland (Hong Kong men), and Bob Ursel (Canada men) (Japan men).
