YOUTH IS SERVED
With Canada’s national women’s team enjoying its greatest international success ever, a medal in Rio is within reach
If it’s still yet a stretch to call it a golden age, it’s at least a period of podium potential for the Canadian senior women’s national basketball program.
“Maybe I am really optimistic, but I think we can medal soon,” says Allison McNeill, the team’s former head coach, who retired after leading Canada to the quarter-finals at the 2012 Olympics. “I don’t want to put pressure on ( head coach Lisa Thomaidis) and the players, but I think we’re getting close.” By anyone’s metric they are. Canada is coming off a fifth-place finish in October at the FIBA World Championships in Turkey, the program’s best showing in 28 years. Yet perhaps even more impressive is that the rise to global prominence has occurred during a significant phase of transition from the veterans who delivered Canada to the world stage, to the youth who are planning an extended run of success on it.
“We have veterans who have been through the good and the bad and they have led us to where we are now,” says Thomaidis of elders like Kim Gaucher, Shona Thorburn, Tamara Tatham and Lizanne Murphy. “But a big key for them is to impart on the young kids the importance of how none of this happened overnight. It’s taken a ton of hard work. They can’t take this for granted. It’s great that they have confidence, but they also need to have an appreciation of where we’ve come from.”
With recent Olympic Games providing the prism, consider that Canada was 11th in a 12-team field at the 1996 Atlanta Games, and 10th out of 12 in 2000 at Sydney before an extended dry spell ended with London. Then contrast that with three straight trips to the world championships, and three straight top-three finishes at the FIBA Americas tournament, including the most recent: second place in 2013.
And now, with the program in the midst of its renaissance, comes the cherry on the top.
The 2015 FIBA Americas tournament, which sends its winner directly to the 2016 Olympics in Rio, returns to Canadian soil for the first time in two decades when Edmonton, the new home base for the women’s program, plays the host role this August. As a lead-in, Canada will play at the Pan Am Games in July in Toronto.
“It’s an understatement to say how excited we are,” said Denise Dignard, Canada Basketball’s highperformance director for women. “During the last quad, I said to both Michele O’Keefe (executive director) and Wayne Parrish (president/ CEO) that the dream would be to host a qualifier on home soil.”
With Brazil hosting the Olympics the following year — and the U.S. winning the world championships to gain an automatic bid — everything fell into place for the women’s program to play host for the first time since 1995, when the legendary Bev Smith, now a national team assistant, was still a player. That year, Canada beat Cuba in the final at a tournament staged in Hamilton.
The team that will take to the court in Edmonton some 20 years later? Thomaidis is no doubt excited to see just how much more the younger core will be able to give, especially as it expects to welcome back Natalie Achonwa of Guelph, Ont., a six-foot-three forward who tore her ACL last March during her final NCAA tournament with Notre Dame.
Achonwa, now of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, played for Canada at the London Games at just 19. The team’s ascendant young point guard, Kia Nurse, the Hamilton native who starts for the Connecticut Huskies, was just 18 last fall when she averaged 21.9 minutes per contest at the world championships.
“We brought (Nurse) in for some experience. But we knew after two days that she was going to be the one. We didn’t see any reason to keep her out of the team just because she was young.”
At worlds, with what was largely a 10-player rotation, veterans Gaucher (age 30, Mission, B.C.), Tatham (29, Brampton, Ont.) and Miranda Ayim (26, London, Ont.), along with Nurse and 23-year-old MiahMarie Langlois ( Windsor, Ont.) all played between 21 and 24 minutes per game. Veterans Thorburn (32, Hamilton) and Murphy (30, Beaconsfield, Que.), along with UCLA guard Nirra Fields (21, Lachine, Que.) and Edmonton’s 22-yearold twins Katherine and Michelle Plouffe, make up the rest of a team whose roster features six players aged 29 to 32, and six aged 19 to 26.
There is, of course, a delivery system consisting of a development team, a junior team and a cadet team, all of whom are meeting with similar international success.
“We built with the Natalie Achonwas who was still so young (19) when she went to the Olympics,” says McNeill, who now coaches as part of Canada Basketball’s Centre For Performance in B.C. “We invested in our young athletes with potential and it has paid off. Some really good players are going to get cut from the national team and that hasn’t always happened.”
Adds Thomaidis, also the head coach of the University of Saskatchewan: “The USA is headand-shoulders above, but when you look at Nos. 2-8, there isn’t much to choose between us.”