Apparently nice guys – and gals – don’t always finish last.

Sudbury curling sensation Tracy Fleury has earned a well-deserved reputation everywhere she travels as being among the most cordial of athletes in all of sport, her ever-present smile having graced television screens from coast to coast many times over these past few years.

As vice-skip with Team Homan, she is also a key part of a rink that is now being talked about as potentially the greatest all-time female foursome in the history of curling in Canada. That kind of talk ensues when you compile the kind of resume of accomplishments that she and Rachel Homan (skip), Emma Miskew (second) and Sarah Wilkes (lead) have over the past three years.

Crowned as world champions for a second straight year after defeating the Silvana Tirinzoni (Switzerland) crew in back to back finals in 2024 & 2025, Fleury and company dove-tailed nicely on their performance at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts.

This juggernaut collection of talent has now won 22 straight games at the Canadian Women’s Curling Championships in the past two years, combining their two national titles with a healthy collection of Grand Slam victories and appearances in finals of most every event that they enter.

So just how critical is the ultra-cordial northern gal to this team success?

Consider, for a moment, that not only was Tracy Fleury named to the all-star team at the 2025 LGT World Women’s Curling Championship in South Korea, deemed as the best vice-skip among the thirteen best teams in the world that assembled for the competition, but she was also among the truly elite of all 52 curlers on hand.

That is the conclusion one has to draw when you look at the fact that Fleury curled at an astounding 88.1% rate over the course of week, a standard that was bettered only by a small handful of leads. To be clear: not a single skip or vice-skip curled better, statistically speaking, than Tracy Fleury did at the Worlds.

“It is a team sport and I know that my teammates help me make every shot, from Rachel placing her broom and calling the line to our sweepers who are incredible,” said Fleury last week, her humility shining through as it always does.

“But it (the all-star selection) is nice in the sense that when I started a new position, I was nervous about it. It’s validating to find success at a new position, I would say.”

The backdrop to all of her success is the knowledge that Tracy Fleury had been a lifelong skip – and an extremely successful one, qualifying for several Scotties and coming within an extra-end loss of representing Canada at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing.

As much as the 2022-2023 season, the inaugural winter schedule for this current edition of Team Homan, saw the quartet tinkering with their back-end roster, the move to the incarnation that has dominated women’s curling the past two years cannot be contested.

No team in recent memory (and most likely ever) has come close to the 67-7 record that Team Homan posted in 2023-2024 – and it’s still possible the team could better that mark this year.

“We knew that this year, we would have targets on our backs,” said Fleury, discussing the mindset heading into the World Championship. “Against the defending champions, everyone always plays better. We knew that last year would be hard to replicate – so to be able to do it twice is unbelievable.”

“I’m really proud of my teammates for grinding through.”

It’s somewhat astounding to consider just how high the bar has been set for this team. For as much as Team Canada finished tied for second place after round robin play last week, their record of 10-2 dead even with South Korea and just one game back of Switzerland, there were those two losses that were a bit outside the norm.

“Losing always feels a little uncomfortable for us,” said Fleury with a smile. “We talked a lot about those losses and what we could have done better and learned from them. And I think we did a good job with that.”

If the resume they have compiled isn’t frightening enough for those who have to take to the ice opposite Team Homan, ponder for a moment that we may not yet have seen the absolute best from these women just yet.

“We are proud of our success so far, but we still feel that there is more than we can do,” said Fleury. “We’re not going to settle. We’re just going to keep pushing to try and achieve more.”

And she says it all with a smile true to the personality of a super nice young lady, one who more often than not finishes first.

Don’t let age old axioms have you believe otherwise.