Elaine Dagg-Jackson grew up at the curling rink. She remembers playing quietly behind the glass as her parents competed on the tidy sheets of the Vancouver Curling Club.
She was raised in a milieu where a "house" did not necessarily mean a home, where a "hog line" had nothing to do with pigs, and where a "hack" was a piece of rubber for pushing off as much as it was a smoker's cough.
She even married into a curling family and spent her honeymoon at a bonspiel in Salmon Arm -- which would have been romantic had her husband not been at a bonspiel in Winnipeg.
"It's a sport bigger than a sport. It's a way of life," she says. "It's my heritage."
She no longer barks instruction from the hack, or pushes a broom like a manic janitor. Instead, she is one of Canada's top coaches in a favourite national game.
She spent last month in Turin, Italy, where she helped coach the Canadian women's team to a bronze medal. The consolation prize for a foursome expected to win gold could have been worse, had they returned home empty-handed.
"Fourth," the Team Canada coach says, curling her lip at the prospect. "You'd rather be last."
The quartet, skipped by Shannon Kleibrink, lost a sloppy semifinal game against Switzerland during a week in which the curlers battled a debilitating stomach flu. Afterwards, the despondent Team Canada crew sat in the locker room. Their coach told them to take time to mourn the loss, but warned they needed to be prepared to win their final game. "Bye -- it's gone," she said of the gold medal. "Less than 24 hours later, you've got to play for a medal."
The next day, the team sat in the dressing room they had decorated with motivational posters and letters from school children. The coach remembers the atmosphere as "tense and nervous."
Someone turned up the volume on the song Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy). As the women sang, Jamie Korab and Mike Adam of the Canadian men's team burst into the room riding their curling brooms as horses, slapping their own butts. The players collapsed into hysterics. Only the coach cocked a wary eye at the shenanigans.
"I was worried," she recalls. "It was hilarious, but was it the right thing for all of them?"
She relaxed only after the first end, in which Canada scored four on the way to a smooth 11-5 victory over Norway. "They played with joy, with a free heart."
The Turin Olympics were the third for Ms. Dagg-Jackson, who coached Julie Sutton's rink to a third-place finish at the 1992 Albertville Winter Games.
In 1994, she and husband, Glen Jackson, were hired to coach the men's and women's Japanese national teams in preparation for the Nagano Games of 1998. Both teams climbed the rankings before finishing fifth at the Olympics.
Ms. Dagg-Jackson resigned from the Japanese team to handle coaching duties with Kelley Law's rink and seemed destined to take a team to the podium at Salt Lake City in 2002, but the skip made a coaching change on the eve of the Olympics, where Ms. Law's rink finished third.
"Coaching is a real art," Ms. Dagg-Jackson says. "To be a good coach, you have to know how to work with every kind of athlete. It's challenging but it's the ultimate challenge."
Curling is in her bloodline. Her father, Lyall Dagg, grew up in a family of three boys and three girls led by a pair of curling parents.
In 1964, Mr. Dagg skipped his rink to the B.C. title and then won the Brier to take the Canadian championship at Charlottetown. He then claimed the Scotch Cup world championship against Scotland in Calgary.
Once, while attending Magee High School, she slipped out of class to use the school's pay phone to call a radio station for an update on the score of a game involving her father. The principal caught her and ordered her into his office. He was listening to a radio broadcast of a game her father would win.
As a teenager, she did not particularly care for the sport. She remembers standing a bus stop with her broom in hand. "It was the Seventies, man. It was so uncool."
Though she stayed with the sport, she feels she never achieved her potential as a player. She was a fifth, a spare, for Pat Sanders's 1987 world championship rink, as well as for the successful Julie Sutton team.
Thirty years after her father's triumph, Ms. Dagg-Jackson decided to put aside a career in publicity and advertising to dedicate herself to the sport.
"All I wanted to do was coach. I didn't care if I made a penny," she says. She and her husband live in Victoria with their 19-year-old daughter, Steph, and 17-year-old son, Cal.
Ms. Dagg-Jackson, now coach of Canada's national women's team, can't wait for the 2010 Winter Games. She figures one good Turin deserves another and wants to be guiding Canada in Vancouver.
A new curling rink for the Olympics is to be built at the same park that now houses the Vancouver Curling Club.
She will be returning to the site where her father launched his campaign for the world championship, where she played off the ice as a little girl. She has already lived a longer life than her father did: he died at age 45 of a rare blood disease.
She can think of no better way to culminate her career and honour her family's legacy than by coaching Canada to an Olympic medal in her hometown.