CURLING: Fenson rink falls in finals at Youth Olympic trials

BLAINE - A team skipped by Riley Fenson of Bemidji forced a second game in the championship round of Sunday’s 2016 U.S. Youth Olympic Team Trials for Curling, but the Luc Violette rink of Seattle won after the Fenson team failed to get off its final shot in time.
Violette (Lake Stevens, Wash.) and teammates Cora Farrell (Fairbanks, Alaska), Benjamin Richardson (Issaquah, Wash.), and Cait Flannery (Mankato) defeated Fenson’s Minnesota team 4-3 in the second championship final at the Four Seasons Curling Club in Blaine, and will now represent the United States at February’s Youth Olympic Winter Games in Norway.
In what was a close final battle, Fenson and his team of Christine McMakin (St. Paul), Graem Fenson (Bemidji), and Allison Howell (Bentleyville, Ohio) had just six seconds on their time clock and the skip sprinted up the sheet and got in the hack but couldn’t deliver it before the clock displayed zero. The result is an automatic forfeit.
The game was a defensive battle between the two teams who had played earlier that day. Fenson had defeated Violette 5-4. The teams then returned to the ice an hour later to decide the championship.
Fenson’s team intended to blank the first end but ended up taking a point. After that they forced Violette into a tough draw that was a little heavy and the Fenson rink stole a point to go up 2-0. Violette’s squad was forced to take a point in the third end and duplicated what Fenson’s team did and stole the fourth end to put the game in a tie situation at the break.
In the fifth end, the Fenson rink was forced into taking a point but then got stones positioned well around the four-foot in the sixth end to hold their Washington opponent to a single point.
The game turned in favor of Washington in the seventh end, however, as they capitalized on half shots to steal a point when Fenson’s final stone was wide.
Violette’s team, which went through the round robin undefeated, played solid in the eighth end and had the Fenson rink chasing. It wasn’t until McMakin’s second vice skip stone that they had a workable stone in the four-foot. Violette answered with two solid rocks to force Fenson into making a draw to the button to try to score a point to put the game into an extra end. With the clock ticking down and the distance down the sheet too far, Fenson couldn’t get there in time.
The Fenson team finished 4-1 in the round robin and their only losses were to Violette.
The Violette rink, now Team USA, will compete in traditional mixed games as well as mixed doubles at the 2016 Youth Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, Feb. 12-21.