Curling Legend Colleen Jones, 1959-2025

HALIFAX – Colleen Jones, the brash Nova Scotia skip who won six national and two world championship titles and also covered multiple curling championships for CBC Sports, has died.

Jones, 65, passed away from a private three-year battle with cancer this morning, just two weeks after her November induction into the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame.

It was merely the latest honour bestowed on Jones, who was previously inducted into the Canadian and World Curling Halls of Fame as well as the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame.

She also received the Order of Canada in 2024, after her nomination in 2022.

The shocking news broke as Canada’s top curlers are battling at the Canadian Olympic Curling Trials at the ScotiaBank Centre, just a short drive away from the original site of Jones’ Mayflower Curling Club, which relocated to a new home in September.

In 1982 Jones was the youngest skip, at 22, to win the Canadian women’s curling championship. After subsequent years spent focussing on family and her eventual 40-year career at CBC-TV, she returned to the ice with a vengeance and won five additional STOH titles, four of them in a row between 2001-04.

Jones also won two world championship crowns, plus two Canadian mixed titles.

From 1988 through the 1990s, Jones teamed with fellow analyst Don Duguid and play-by-play veteran Don Wittman for CBC Sport coverage of championship curling. She attended multiple winter and summer Olympic Games for the network, and provided curling analysis for NBC Sports in the U.S. at the previous three Winter Games.

Jones wrote two books, Curling Secrets: How to Think and Play Like a Pro in 2007 and Throwing Rocks at Houses: My Life In and Out of Curling in 2015.

Jones also wrote select guest columns for The Curling News, when it was known as Canadian Curling News, and appeared in the 2011 Women of Curling Calendar to benefit charity.

In recent years, Jones coached her son’s teams at the mixed doubles and men’s Brier championships and teamed with CBC Sports reporter Devin Heroux in a YouTube series, That Curling Show.

Jones starred in one of the most thrilling finishes to a national women’s championship final. In 2001, her final stone of the match needed an umpire’s measurement, and after a lengthy delay, Jones was declared the winner over defending champion Kelley Law.