gsoc01

By Ben Hoppe

When a team has a roster change, growing pains are to be expected. The team needs reps together to understand how to communicate with each other, and it’s a process that can take time. When Team Peterson brought in Taylor Anderson-Heide to play lead for the 2024-25 season, time was not on their side.

Second Tara Peterson was expecting her first child to arrive at the very beginning of the curling season, while her sister Tabitha’s firstborn was due just a couple months later. Tabitha was able to skip some games but had to step away in mid-September. Tara rejoined the team in the middle of October, just over a month after welcoming her firstborn to the world. And in between? The team had to make do without either of the Peterson sisters.

They had to shuffle the roster constantly to make it through events, and the reigning national champions even had to look to their coach, Cathy Overton-Clapham, to throw lead rocks and call the game on occasion.

“We knew the season would be full of unknowns,” Tara Peterson told me in March. “Everyone knew that any and all lineups were possible.”

It wasn’t until the USA National Championships in January that Team Peterson was able to play in an event as a full team for the first time since the roster was announced in early summer of 2024.

Even with those challenges, Tabitha Peterson was able to win her third consecutive national championship in an extra-end victory over Elizabeth Cousins.

The lack of reps together clearly took a toll on the team at the World Women's Curling Championship, though, as the team lost its final six games and failed to secure a bid to the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, putting a wrap on a season that vice-skip Cory Thiesse characterized as “really challenging.”

The team still managed to keep everything in perspective and know what’s most important to them after a difficult season.

"We got two beautiful babies out of it, so we wouldn’t change a thing," Tara Peterson said.

Despite a ready-made and incredibly valid reason for their struggles last season, the team made sure to learn from the year they were leaving behind.

"We had a team debrief," Tabitha Peterson shared. "And it wasn't just, 'Oh, flush it. That's not us.' There are lots of things we pinpointed and changes we wanted to make, and how we wanted to structure the next season so that we're in the best spot."

Those plans have certainly borne fruit to start the 2025-26 season. In the first event, a three-team playdown to determine the U.S. representatives for the Pan Continental Curling Championships, Peterson lost the first two games but then won out to take the event.

The team repeated this feat a couple weeks later, dropping their first two games at the Euro Super Series in Scotland before going undefeated to win their first event outside of the U.S. since the 2021 Autumn Gold Classic in Canada.

At the Pan Continental Curling Championships this past week in Minnesota, Peterson looked like a team that belongs on the international stage. While they dropped their final two games of the round robin and ended up losing the bronze medal match, they were never out of any game. Three of the four losses came in an extra end, and they also notched wins over highly ranked international teams.

"We’re where we want to be," Thiesse said.

The Minnesota-based rink is making up for the reps they lost last season, logging nearly 40 games over three months. They’re starting to click at the right time, and now all of their attention turns to the U.S. Olympic Trials where they enter as the most experienced team in the field by a large margin.

Their road to the Olympic Trials has been bumpy, but when Tabitha Peterson thinks back on the last 16 months, she chooses to look on their journey with a positive outlook: "Everything happened how it was supposed to happen."

What happens next? That’s up to them when they take the ice in Sioux Falls, S.D.

SHUSTER RUNNER-UP AT PAN CONTINENTALS

Because the World Men’s Curling Championship will be held in the United States next spring, Team Shuster wasn’t playing for world championship qualification at the Pan Continental Curling Championships. It didn’t mean they had nothing to play for, though, when they took the ice as Team USA just 20 minutes from John Shuster’s hometown in the Iron Range of northern Minnesota.

It was clear the event meant a great deal to the team, and they gave U.S. fans plenty to cheer about throughout the week, posting a 7-2 record. The only two losses for Shuster came against Canada’s Brad Jacobs. The round-robin loss came in an extra-end thriller, and the final was no slouch either.

The gold medal game was tied going into the ninth end, and Team USA looked to be in good shape to either force or steal going into Shuster’s final rock. The 2018 gold medallist’s draw was just heavy and bounced off Canada’s rock in the back of the four-foot circle. Jacobs made the hit for two, and Shuster wasn’t able to generate two points in the final end.

“If you don’t play perfect against those guys, you don’t win very often,” Shuster told World Curling after the game.

TEAM CASPER WINS IN SAULT STE. MARIE

Danny Casper’s rink has been on fire all season, and in Sault Ste. Marie. Ont., they showed they could do it without him.

While Casper spared on Team Shuster at the Pan Continentals and played front end for a few games, his teammates continued their impressive season in a strong field at the Henderson Metal Fall Classic.

Experienced fifth Rich Ruohnen threw lead rocks and skipped the team while Luc Violette threw the brick in Sault Ste. Marie.

They matched up against Italy’s Team Retornaz in the final and found themselves down by two points with two ends to play. The entire team executed a come-around tap to perfection on Violette’s last rock in the seventh end to score three. In the final end, Team Casper made a perfect draw on their last, and Retornaz was unable to make the difficult tap with the hammer to score.

It was Team Casper's second event win of the season after winning the AMJ Masters Tier 2 event last month.

Not only are they looking like they can take on anybody ahead of the U.S. Olympic Trials, the team is making a strong case for a spot in January’s Players' Championship.