Gaucher still pushes Canadian women’s basketball forward at 34
It takes Bridget Carleton the blink of an eye to mention the Canadian basketball player she most looks up to.
“Kim Gaucher,” the 22-year-old university senior and budding national team regular says after a workout with the team.
It takes Gaucher less time to jokingly explain why that’s so.
“You see we train them young, like, ‘Hey, you have to say us when you come into the program,” Gaucher said Monday with a chuckle. “It better be me. If you’re going to list somebody, it better be me.”
It speaks volumes to Gaucher’s impact on the program that she can be seen both as an icon to emulate and a teammate to rely on as Canada finishes off its preparation for the world championship later this month in Spain. The 34-year-old has been with the program since 2001, a two-time Olympian, a veteran of two world championships and a tie between the bad old days and the good times the women are experiencing now.
She was there in the dark days when the program was growing, and she’s there now that it’s ranked fifth in the world and harbouring legitimate medal chances at the worlds Sept. 22-30.
Watching her drain threepointer after three-pointer in a shooting drill at Ryerson’s Mattamy Centre on Monday proves beyond a shadow of doubt she’s still a productive player.
Listening to coaches and teammates talk about her and it’s just as obvious that she contributes in so many other ways as well.
“She’s playing as well now as she probably ever has in her career when you look at how she’s shooting the ball and what she does with her IQ and ability to anticipate and just the toughness part,” said head coach
Lisa Thomaidis.
The perspective Gaucher brings is unique to this group, now that a handful of her Olympic teammates are retired.
“Even if they’re not. I tell them. I’m like, ‘You guys have no idea.’ If they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m tired,’ I’m like, ‘This training camp is five days long, I don’t want to hear that you’re tired. We’ve done 40-day ones,’” she said. “I think sometimes they laugh at us. I was telling them how I used to bring an alarm clock to training camp because you didn’t have cellphones, things like that. … Literally had to pack a towel because they didn’t give us towels at the dorms. And an alarm clock.”
Quite aside from an air-conditioned downtown hotel, first-rate facilities at Mattamy, a one-practice-a-day camp and the chance to seriously contribute to a good team, Gaucher’s decision to stick with the program after the Rio Olympics came down to the heart. “It’s 100 per cent the passion that I have, and the love that I have for playing,” she says. “I had signed a three-year contract — last year was my first year in a three-year contract (with Mondeville of the French league) — and it was like if there was any way that I still could help out, that I still could be good enough, then for me, playing for Canada is the greatest. ”