Hunting every possible advantage for Teams Jacobs and Homan in Milan, Curling Canada analytics lead Renée Sonnenberg is doing whatever she can to help bring Olympic medals back to Canada
Brad Jacobs and his veteran team from Alberta just gave up a steal in the ninth and at the far end of Sheet 2 at the Scotiabank Centre in Halifax, their coach, Paul Webster, is sitting behind a desk and feeling mighty nervous.
Ahead of this matchup against the world No. 2 team, Webster, Jacobs, Marc Kennedy, Brett Gallant and Ben Hebert had a meeting where their world No. 4 squad agreed: “We want to be tied with hammer in 10. That’s our goal.” Even though they’d prefer to be leading by a touchdown, realism was key considering their opponent and what’s at stake.
So sticking to the plan, Team Jacobs decided that instead of attempting a draw for one in the ninth or trying to blank the end, they’d take out one of Matt Dunstone’s two rocks in the rings, give up a single point and carry the hammer home. Their goal scenario is here, yet Webster can’t help but sweat a little. So, just before the 10th end starts, the coach sends a text to Curling Canada’s analytics lead, Renée Sonnenberg, who’s sitting behind two big computer screens high up in the arena with a view of the ice below. “What are our stats in this situation?” Webster asks. Sonnenberg replies within seconds: “8-1 in the last two years while tied with hammer.”
Webster’s nerves calm significantly. He likes those odds.
Minutes later, Jacobs takes a deep breath and lets fly his last shot. Kennedy is calling line, Hebert and Gallant sweep the stone right out of Jacobs’ hand. Their yellow rock hits Dunstone’s red one and then rolls and sticks for the 6-5 win in this Canadian Olympic Trials final, turning Team Jacobs into Team Canada in Cortina. It also improves their record to 9-1 when they’re all tied up in 10 with hammer.
The team in Jacobs’ shoes usually wins in that scenario thanks to that last-shot advantage, something the most casual curling observer knows. But up in her booth as this consequential game unfolded, Sonnenberg saw that finish more clearly than anyone. She knew what percentage of the time Jacobs finds success with a hit-and-roll, whether he should throw the in- or out-turn, how many seconds it should take for that stone to connect with his opponent’s, even if his team is historically more likely to score during an odd or an even-numbered end. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of her knowledge.
“I want medals for Canada. I’ll do everything I can to help them get there.”
The one-woman analytics department for Curling Canada’s high-performance program, Sonnenberg is a former math teacher who’s now diving into the numbers in hopes of improving results for the best curling teams in this country on the biggest stages. A former skip, who led Alberta to silver at the 2014 Scotties, Sonnenberg has created an ever-growing resource for Canada’s best curlers, which includes information on every team in the Olympic field, including world No. 1 Bruce Mouat and his crew from Scotland, and Switzerland’s Silvana Tirinzoni, the No. 2 on the women’s side behind Canada’s own Rachel Homan.
The hope is that Sonnenberg’s data, and the insights pulled from it, can help change the script for this curling-obsessed nation. Not since 2014 has Canada taken home Olympic gold in the four-person event, and the last two Games have produced just one medal from the men’s and women’s teams, a bronze four years ago, won by skip Brad Gushue and his Newfoundland rink. The rest of the world is no doubt getting better, but as Team Jacobs and Team Homan try to get Canada back on the Olympic podium, Sonnenberg will play a significant role for both. She’s the first to admit there are still many inroads to be made in analytics on pebbled ice, but Sonnenberg has made it her mission to ensure Canada is at the forefront of those efforts. Team Homan’s coach, Heather Nedohin, can only shake her head when she thinks about the value Sonnenberg provides: “She’s our secret weapon.”
Eight years ago in Sochi, Sonnenberg was on the coaching staff for Homan’s world No. 1 team, the reigning world champions and favourites to bring home gold at the 2018 Winter Games. Canada had made Olympic curling history four years earlier, when Jennifer Jones led her team on an undefeated run to gold and Jacobs skipped the men’s side to the top of the podium, which marked the first time a country swept the sport at the Olympics and the first time a women’s curling team went undefeated. Homan, Emma Miskew, Joanne Courtney and Lisa Weagle then made Canadian Olympic history of a different kind: They lost their first three games of the round robin, and though they rallied to a 4-5 record, they became the first Canadian curling team to fail to make a medal round at the Olympics since the sport was officially added to the Winter Games schedule in 1998.
“It was hard to watch them struggle when you know that’s not who they are,” says Sonnenberg, who remembers Team Homan’s sixth-place finish well. “They’re great champions, but those kinds of losses for our country are what fuel me. How can I help us not be there again?”
She’s been thinking about that ever since, and there have been plenty of recent results to further fuel her work. Canada hasn’t won a world men’s curling title since 2017. Homan and Co., meanwhile, have owned the women’s side the last two years, but Switzerland’s Tirinzoni won four straight world championships before that and her team remains a major threat.
Sonnenberg made the analytics of the game a full-time job in 2020, when the sport’s national governing body got the funding to make that possible. She says she only “dabbled” in the data before that. A former player, educator and coach, Sonnenberg is perfect for the role, and Canada needed it. While boasting the most depth of any curling nation, other major powers in the sport like Switzerland, Sweden and Scotland make it a full-time gig for their top athletes. That’s the case for just a few Canadians, and the top teams have athletes living in different provinces, so they do most practices apart, making data even more important to help inform those training sessions.
Sonnenberg works with Shoreview Sports Analytics, which helps her comb through data and assists in the creation of easy-to-understand reports for athletes and coaches. The breadth of information is vast as all get-out. She might compare Team Homan’s success playing a clockwise corner guard versus a counterclockwise corner guard, for example. “The different tactical approaches — what’s working? Where are we getting into trouble? How do we train that shot,” Sonnenberg explains. “Even if it’s a wide-open end and I have to place a rock in the rings, where do I want to put it to hopefully get my international opponent to make a mistake?”
On the men’s side, Sonnenberg noticed that Swiss lead Pablo Lachat-Couchepin only throws clockwise to the middle of the sheet, never counterclockwise. “Can we position a corner guard that makes it a little harder?” she asks. “At the highest level, we’re looking for a half-shot, maybe two, in a game. But if we can get that half-shot at the right time and make them pay for it, it could set us up for success.”
“We haven’t even tapped in close to everything she’s capable of doing — there’s a lot of information in there.”
Viktor Kjell is the women’s head coach in Cortina, and he was four years ago when Jones and Co. finished just short of the playoffs. Kjell had scouting reports on other teams at the 2022 Olympics, but when it comes to the level of detail available this time around, it’s night and day. “We have our own little playbook,” he says. “Renéehas the ability to extract those specific points and draw our attention to them, and it’s way easier and can happen way faster than it did in the past.”
There have been stats in curling for decades, but Sonnenberg developed a tool called Shot Tracker for coaches and players to not only see that a shot wasn’t perfect, but what type of miss it was. Coaches input at least four pieces of data for every shot — it’s a quick succession of clicks, Sonnenberg says — and colour-coded results appear instantly. Purple means the shot was heavy, green means it was perfect, light blue means it under-curled. “If one player has a lot of under-curls, you can say to them: ‘Your shot tracker is showing a lot of light blue here. I think you need to tighten your slide line,’” Sonnenberg explains. “The goal is that they would be able to pivot in the middle of the game.” Shot Tracker also highlights where athletes should focus in training, and what skills they should leverage.
That information, plus scouting reports on competition, also helps teams with tactical decisions — sometimes mid-game.
“Most of the time, we do just play our game,” Miskew says. “But if we have a choice at some point that could force a turn preference or something for another team, we would have that in the back of our minds.”
Adds Kjell: “There might be some details that we don’t share directly with the team, but if it’s needed in a game, or if it’s a timeout, then we have that available to us.”
Team Homan enters these Olympics as two-time defending world champions, coming off a season that has seen them win just about everything there is to win, including the Scotties and three of the last five Grand Slams. And as Homan and Miskew take another run at an Olympic medal, the additions of Fleury and Wilkes aren’t the only changes to the team compared to eight years ago.
“Rachel and Emma are completely different athletes than they were in 2018 in terms of how they approach the game,” Sonnenberg says. “Of all the teams that have shown growth in the area of video and analytics, they’re the most engaged with me. They reach out all the time.”
Fleury’s face lights up at the mention of Sonnenberg, and the first two words out of the third’s mouth are: “She’s brilliant.” Fleury says it’s “constant communication” between her team and the analytics lead, at least weekly and even more often with Homan as it relates to strategy. They review video after every game. This past summer, they got together with Sonnenberg for a year-end review and dug into their strengths and weaknesses.
“It’s not, ‘You’re doing this badly,’ it’s more like, ‘Where can I tighten up in this area? Where can I get an extra couple percentages by throwing maybe a little more weight?’” Miskew explains. “It’s recognizing our own tendencies. And being able to have data for that is always helpful, because it’s black-and-white.”
A couple of seasons ago, Kennedy noticed a lot of players were regularly making hit-and-rolls, but he couldn’t seem to. “We did a little bit of a deeper dive as to why, and it wasn’t necessarily something technical or mechanical, it was more just weight control,” he says. “And I think within one year of putting some extra time and effort into it, I was right up there in stats in the world when it came to hit-and-rolls. And that’s just one example of how Renée has helped.”
Sonnenberg revels in showing teams video that can make clear to players what went right or wrong, and why, on certain shots. “People are taking responsibility for the role they play that they may never even have been aware that they played,” she says. “And then it’s very disarming: the video doesn’t lie, right?”
“Maybe you’re light more than heavy, or you’re heavy or wide or narrow, or maybe the shot was made out of the hand, but you missed it with the sweeping call,” Fleury explains. Knowing how the miss happened helps the team make necessary adjustments.
Then there’s the international scouting aspect, which is understandably hush-hush. “If she has data that could affect some of the strategies, some of the shots that we would maybe leave for the other team, Renée gives us all those numbers,” Fleury says, though the third is quick to stop there. “I don’t want to give away too much,” she adds with a laugh.
“The depth of analysis we’re doing now, I don’t think there’s any other country doing it in the detail that we are.”
A former skip, Fleury joined the team in 2022, not long after she lost a heartbreaker in the final of Olympic Trials in November 2021. This version of Team Homan, with Fleury at third, has been working toward Cortina ever since.
“They have been doing everything for this,” says Kjell. “They’re curious all the time. ‘What do we need to improve? What are the small details that will make us even better?’”
That same type of curiosity drives Sonnenberg. “Getting that one little millimeter or that extra shot or a little more percentage out of a player, that’s what she’s brought, is the ability to bring review and reflection and growth, faster,” Nedohin says.
“She’s kind of working in the shadows, in the best way,” Webster adds.
Sonnenberg is in the Cortina Olympic Stadium every day, watching from behind a computer screen, ready and waiting for communication from Canada’s teams, with all her data, prepared to help whenever she’s needed.
“I want medals for Canada,” she says. “I’ll do everything I can to help them get there.”
Before Brett Gallant qualified to represent Canada in both mixed doubles and men’s team curling at the Olympics, the Team Jacobs second had to train for the possibility. This summer, after meeting with Sonnenberg, he started going to the gym with certain priorities in mind.
If Gallant is throwing hard in mixed doubles, he has to get up and chase down his rock to sweep alongside his wife and partner, Jocelyn Peterman. “If that transition from thrower to sweeper isn’t smooth and strong, there’s a delay, there’s scrambling, and that’s what he was finding,” Sonnenberg says. “So, Brett worked really hard this summer on his fitness and his strength, and his core strength in particular. And you can see it out there now. Even when he throws a hard rock, it’s way more stable.”
That hard work is evident to his teammates. “Yeah,” Kennedy says, “Brett’s really fit.”
It’s a good thing, too, and not only to catch up to his throws in mixed doubles. Gallant’s Olympic schedule is bananas. Mixed doubles began two days before the Opening Ceremony, and even though he and Peterman didn’t go as deep as they hoped — finishing with a 4-5 record and failing to crack the playoffs — Gallant has just one full day off before the men’s competition opens on Wednesday. If Canada goes the distance, he’ll see another 10 days of competition before the gold-medal game on Feb. 21.
Gallant, Jacobs, Kennedy and Hebert will open their tournament against Germany. And this team of “old dogs,” as Kennedy calls them — he’s the oldest, at 44, and Gallant, 35, is the youngest — have a few relatively new tricks with them in Cortina. They’ve keyed in on what can give them an edge against other top teams, and they’ve reviewed more video than ever before.
After Sweden’s Niklas Edin beat Mouat in the European Championship semi-final, Team Jacobs contacted Sonnenberg for video of all of Edin’s wins “to get a feel for the games and how they did it,” Kennedy explains. Less than an hour later, Sonnenberg sent them all the games condensed into the big moments they needed to focus on. Sometimes they’ll wonder, “How is Bruce [Mouat] playing games when he’s down two in the sixth end? If they’re down one in the last end, how is Bruce approaching that strategically? How is Niklas in that situation?” So they’ll ask Sonnenberg. “Yeah, she’s quite the resource,” Kennedy says. “And we haven’t even tapped in close to [everything] she’s capable of doing — there’s a lot of information in there. For us, it’s about pulling out little nuggets when we need them.”
Cortina marks Kennedy’s fourth straight Olympics, and he laughs thinking back to the first time he saw a scouting report on an opponent, which was at Vancouver 2010, where he played second for skip Kevin Martin. “I remember us looking at the information and being like: ‘What are we supposed to do with this?’” Kennedy says. “The other team is weaker on their out-turn draws, but does that really affect the way we’re going to call our game? Back in those days, the answer was no. You played your game and if you were good enough, you won.”
“We don’t know what Italy’s going to bring. We’re just happy Renée’s going to be there.”
They were, and they did win gold. Fifteen years later, at the recent 2025 world championships, Sonnenberg sent Team Jacobs data that showed one of their opponents was really struggling with run-backs. “It was top of mind for us during the game,” Kennedy says. “There were a couple opportunities during the game where we had a choice to force the other team to a draw or a run-back and we forced the run-back, and they missed them.”
Coming off the ice after winning that game, the members of Team Jacobs all made sure to say: “Thanks, Renée.”
Nobody’s really sure where Canada stands compared to the rest of the world as it relates to analytics, but there are educated guesses. “The depth of analysis we’re doing now, I don’t think there’s any other country doing it in the detail that we are,” Kjell says. “Renée is taking it to the next level.” Curling Canada’s high-performance director, David Murdoch, a two-time world champion skip from Scotland, believes Canada and Scotland are “among the top two or three nations” when it comes to the use of analytics.
Sonnenberg has seen Korean teams shooting video of their practices and games and some similar tells from Sweden, but “it’s very secretive,” she says. “We don’t talk to the other countries about what they’re doing. And it’s an interesting thing, too, because when I have Canadians that have been through our program and then they go coach for an international team, I’m like, ‘Oh, there goes some of our knowledge.’ And at first it used to really bother me, like, ‘I can’t believe they know everything we do.’
“But what it does now is it fuels me to keep innovating and keep pushing the boundaries so that, ‘You can have that stuff. I’m way ahead of that already — it’s old news.’”
Sonnenberg is constantly working to make new news, and introducing data and analytics to younger players in the high-performance program, hoping the earlier they see it, the deeper they’ll eventually dive in. She can’t wait for the day when coaches and players can review shots right after they happen, like in many other sports. There’s so much progress she wants to see. “We’re seeing more decisions based on analytics, we are seeing more training designed from analytics — but it’s not moving as fast as I want,” she says.
The curlers are well aware of that. “She’s looking at you like, ‘You guys have no idea how much information I have. Please ask me for it and I will give it to you. I’m not going to give it all to you, because that’s too much, but what do you need?’” Kennedy says, with a laugh. “With her own approach to it, she’s forcing teams to take a better look at it because she knows the answers are in there.”
Sonnenberg has only begun to unlock those answers, and her eyes light up when she talks about the future. “I feel like curling has a ton of room to grow here, and it’s exciting because it’s, where do we want to go?” she asks. “How is your core strength related to your big weight ability? If you train your core strength, does your big weight ability improve? All those kinds of things. Fatigue, daily monitoring —there’s so much we can do and it’s never-ending, and so I’m in constant reflection of ‘where do I channel that?’ I could do a million things, but what are going to be the biggest keys?”
The question now is whether the analytics lead has found an edge that helps the Canadian teams in Cortina produce podium performances.
There are plenty of variables ahead: the pressure athletes feel, the ice conditions, the other teams, even the Norovirus that took down Finland’s women’s hockey team and delayed their start.
“We don’t know what Italy’s going to bring,” Webster says. “We’re just happy Renée’s going to be there.
“Any question we ask is answered, and if she doesn’t have the answer for us, she’ll find it. She always does.”
