Team Cinnamon, of the Cochrane High School, will be heading to St. Paul in early March to defend their provincial high school curling championship.

The high school girls rink won both the divisional title and ASAA South Central zone title in two back-to-back bonspiels last week. They went undefeated throughout both.

The Cinnamon rink is formed by skip Zoe Cinnamon, third, Paige Roux, second Keeley Isinghood, lead Marisa Mueller and spare Sydney Roux. Cinnamon and the Roux sisters were on last year's provincial championship team who brought home the first ever provincial curling banner to the school.

The Heppner rink won the bronze medal. (Photo Courtesy Dawn-Marie Cinnamon)

Cochrane High's other girls' team, the Heppner rink, won the bronze medal and along the way met the Cinnamon team in a CHS vs CHS match. 

Cochrane High and Bow Valley co-hosted the zone championship and had a full eight rinks for each of the boys, girls and mixed events. Five were from Cochrane high schools.

Tammy Hodgson, who heads up the Cochrane High curling program, says she worked together with Eric Richard, of Bow Valley High (who curled in the Alberta men's championship last weekend), with the end goal of involving as many high school students as possible in junior curling. They decided to fill out the bonspiel to a full 24 teams.

"We're trying to promote amateur junior curling in our high schools as much as possible," she explains

It's proving success, too. Both Cochrane High and Bow Valley have weekly curling time slots and there's a Wednesday slot open for all high school curlers. Last year, Cochrane hosted the zone final and split ice time between Cochrane and Springbank with 16 teams participated. This year, they brought the entire bonspiel to the Cochrane Curling Centre

"This year we feel like we've been through our maiden voyage and we felt pretty comfortable with what we're doing so we opted to host it again and it's working out very well. We're very happy," says Hodgson.

No longer the bridesmaid in RVS divisional play. The Schmidtke rink has curled together for four years and won the divisional banner last week. (Photo Courtesy Cochrane High)She says the support of the Cochrane curling community is incredible and many adult curlers and high school alumni volunteer their time.  

In divisional finals in Airdrie, Cochrane High's boys' team won the divisional title after many previous attempts. Levi Schmidtke skipped the team of third Brady Church, second Jared Wunder, lead Jonas Prudden and spare Ky Macaulay.

"These boys have been curling together all four years and they've been the bridesmaid three years in a row. This year they won it so they're quite ecstatic."

The provincial championship is being hosted by St. Paul on Mar. 7-9.