Kia Nurse laments plight of women’s basketball league
TORONTO — Kia Nurse glammed it up on the red carpet at last week’s iHeartRadio MMVAs. She spent a day last month inspiring a group of young women at a downtown Toronto court that Nike had dressed up with a huge billboard in her honour.
The star of Canada’s women’s basketball team hopes her example will spark the dreams of young girls.
She’s made that a major goal of her career.
Yet she worries about the relative anonymity of the WNBA, the world’s best women’s league that few will ever get to watch.
“I can’t even watch the playoffs right now, and that’s really annoying,” Nurse said with a furrowed brow.
“Young women don’t get the opportunity to see that. I could become virtually irrelevant in a couple of years because no one sees me play anymore, and I think that’s a problem considering there’s so much talent and there’s much excitement around women’s basketball right now, and we don’t show it.”
Nurse arrived at Canada’s six-day women’s basketball camp this week on the heels of a standout rookie season with the New York
Liberty.
The highlight was a 34-point performance off the bench against Indiana — franchise records both for points by a rookie and a reserve.
It’s fitting that the camp is at Ryerson University’s Mattamy Athletic Centre, the same building in which the 22-year-old Nurse led Canada to gold at the 2015 Pan Am Games, and then carried the nation’s flag into the closing ceremonies.
The six-foot guard from Hamilton was just 15 when she sat courtside at a Minnesota Lynx game alongside her famous uncle, former NFL quarterback, Donovan McNabb. She’d love every young Canadian woman to have the same experience.
When her UConn Huskies played last December in Toronto, the game was a sellout. Nurse lingered long on the court to pose for selfies with the young girls in the crowd.
“I think sports is so much more than wins and losses,” she said.
“There’s all the life skills (girls) can learn from it. So to be able to show young women that they can do whatever they want, they can get to whatever level they want ... I didn’t go to a prep school, I played three or four tournaments in the states a year, that’s what I did and I still made it where I am now. I think that’s something that I’m most proud of.”
Could she see the WNBA expanding into Canada, one of the few countries without a women’s pro league?
“It would be huge, for me I would love it,” Nurse said.
“If you’ve ever come to a Connecticut game or go to games in Minnesota, those are places where — even New York — you see tons and tons of young women.”
Indiana Fever forward Natalie Achonwa and Nurse’s New York teammate Kayla Alexander are Canada’s other two WNBA players in camp ahead of the World Cup, Sept. 22-30 in Tenerife, Spain.
The WNBA has been making headines recently.
Players have been outspoken about the massive discrepancies in both paycheques and TV coverage between their league and the NBA.