MISSISSAUGA, Ont. — Back in 2007, a 23-year-old Jill Brothers (née Mouzar) knew she was a little out of her depth in her first experience at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts.
Though an accomplished junior curler in her own right, winning a silver medal at the 2004 World Junior Curling Championships, Brothers had found her way to represent Nova Scotia at the annual Canadian women’s championship.
“(I was) really excited, but also really terrified. ... It was like Jennifer Jones, Kelly Scott, Cheryl Bernard, Shannon Kleibrink … the field was out of this world. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’” Brothers shared. “I was very nervous and felt very scared, but I was so excited to be here. It was a lot of mixed emotions.”
The young skip picked up wins over Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick, but went 3-8 overall in the competition. And it’d take her seven years to get back to the tournament once again, though success was still hard to come by.
Nineteen years later and now playing third alongside skip Christina Black, she’s looking to build off last year’s bronze medal — her first Scotties playoff appearance — and a run to the Canadian Olympic Curling Trials final.
“We took some time after the Trials, of course, to kind of come off of that high, but we knew we had to have two peaks this season, so we were pretty strategically planning that out,” teammate Karlee Everist said.
2026 SCOTTIES TOURNAMENT OF HEARTS: SCHEDULE/RESULTS
Brothers is in just her second season with the team, having often been on a collision course with Black on the Atlantic Canada circuit. Brothers herself even represented New Brunswick at the 2023 Scotties, the only one of her nine appearances at the Canadian championship where she wore a different province than Nova Scotia.
And the move to Black’s rink seems to have been paying off in spades, with Brothers admitting that she’d received some inquiries about why it hadn’t happened sooner.
“A lot of people from the Nova Scotia area had kind of been like, ‘Why aren’t you and Christina curling together? Y'all have the same goals. Y'all work hard,' and it just hadn’t lined up or whatever, right? So getting together and seeing the actual drive and commitment from all five of us is hard to find,” Brothers said. “Christina's passion for the game is infectious. I think anyone can see that when they watch her on TV.”
“We literally see each other most days of the week,” Black said of their constant team meetings.
Despite their success in Canada, Black’s rink still struggled a fair bit on the rest of the tour, challenging themselves against the world’s best on the Grand Slam of Curling circuit.
The team failed to make the playoffs at both the AMJ Masters and CO-OP Tour Challenge Grand Slam events, including an 0-4 performance in the latter.
“We knew that the start to this season wasn't like sunshine and lollipops, but at the same time, we were like, ‘That's OK.' We're getting tons of experience. We're playing on a million different ice surfaces,” Brothers said.
At the Scotties, Black’s rink is now 6-1, having clinched a playoff spot despite dropping a round-robin game to Beth Peterson’s Manitoba rink.
“We're getting better every game. We're learning a lot that this ice is probably the trickiest ice we've been on. We haven't really seen any changes in speed,” Everist said.
And in a wide-open field, anything is possible for the fan favourites out of the Halifax Curling Club.
“We're basically right where we want to be,” Brothers said.
Lead photo by Curling Canada/Andrew Klaver
