When Leyden’s Rebecca Rodgers looks across the sheet at next week’s U.S. Women’s National Curling Championships in Kalamazoo, Mich., she will be staring at some familiar faces.
Rodgers and her squad will be one of eight teams vying for the women’s title, and the competition features all of the top teams in the country including last year’s Olympic team featuring skip Nina Roth. In fact, when Rodgers and her “Team Traxler” side open play on Sunday in the seven-day tournament, she will be doing so against two-time defending national champion Team Sinclair, the outfit skipped by Jamie Sinclair that lost to Team Roth for the rights to represent the United States at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
“It’s going to be really exciting. I look up to all these curlers, so to be able to say that I can play with them and keep up with them is really exciting,” Rodgers said last week while home on winter break during her freshman year of college.
Rodgers graduated from Pioneer this past spring and is currently attending the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, which puts her more in the heart of curling country. Three weeks ago, she took part in the U.S. Women’s Junior National Championships where she and Team Traxler (teams are named after the “skip” or captain of the team) had a nice showing to finish third overall for the second year in a row. Rodgers, along with teammates Ariel Traxler (from Fairbanks, Alaska), Emily Quello (Bemidji, Minn.) and Susan Dudt (Malvern, Pa.), opened the tournament 1-3 overall during round-robin play but came back to win their final three matches and finished third overall in the round robin at 4-3, which sent Team Traxler to the three-team elimination round.
“We weren’t sure if we were going to make it,” Rodgers said. “We had a team meeting, talked about it and said that we just have to have fun and get rid of expectations. After that, we kicked it into high gear. We play better when we have fun and we won a bunch of games and got in position to medal.”
In the elimination round, Team Traxler faced Team Flannery but came up short in a 7-1 loss. Flannery went on to beat Team Dubberstein in the finals to win the title and will compete at the World Championships Feb. 16 through 23 in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Team Flannery beating Team Dubberstein in the Women’s Junior Nationals worked out perfectly for Rodgers and her team. While the winning team will compete in the Worlds, the runner-up team from the Women’s Junior Nationals gets a bid into the Women’s Nationals. This year however, Team Dubberstein had actually won a qualifying event, so the third-place team was selected to compete, which gave Team Traxler the bid.
“Everyone won who needed to win and we were in the right place at the right time,” Rodgers said.
Now, Rodgers and her team have their sights set on the biggest curling stage in the country when they compete against the best women the country has to offer.
“I’m really excited, it’s a really cool environment and we play in an arena and fans can come and watch,” Rodgers said. “It’s a very different energy than Junior Nationals.”
Team Traxler will play each of the seven other teams in the field during the round robin stage. The Opening Ceremonies take place Saturday evening, and tourney play begins Sunday morning. Rodgers and Team Traxler open up at noon against Team Sinclair. Traxler will play a second match on Sunday night at 8. Traxler has one match on Day 2 of the tournament (Monday at 2 p.m.), and two on Day 3 (Tuesday at 9 a.m. and 7 p.m.).
Wednesday may be the biggest day of the tournament for Rodgers and her team as they face Team Roth — which finished eighth at last year’s Olympic Games — in a 2 p.m. contest. Thursday is the final day of round-robin play, and the top three teams qualify for the playoffs. Rodgers and her squad will look to finish better than their fifth-place performance last year.
Rodgers also has her sights on qualifying for the U.S. Junior National High Performance Team, which she should hear about in May. There will be three openings on the team this year. If she is accepted, she will spend the summer at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado. She will then compete with the team at tournaments around the world throughout the year.
All the while, she will continue her studies at Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where she is still undecided but leaning toward the biology field. Her first semester went well, as she finished with a 3.9 grade point average. She is succeeding in the classroom and on the sheet.
“It’s actually been really good, especially from a curling standpoint,” Rodgers said of being in Wisconsin. “I have been able to practice more, and even get ice time by myself to focus on what I need to work on.”