Friendliest of rivalries hits the floor
McMaster, Saskatchewan coaches share deep bond, but only one can win
They are friends first, have been for decades and will be for years and years to come, but when Theresa Burns and Lisa Thomaidis run into each other around the U Sports women’s basketball championship Friday, there will not be a lot of time for catching up.
As much as they respect and admire each other, there will be few niceties before Burns’ McMaster Marauders and Thomaidis’s Saskatchewan Huskies meet in Saturday’s semifinals at the Mattamy Athletic Centre.
McMaster beat Concordia 8668 and Saskatchewan held off Acadia in a 77-69 win to set up the Saturday semifinal. Topseeded Laval silenced a loud crowd to beat Ryerson 73-51 and will meet Ottawa, a 65-63 winner over Regina, in the second semifinal.
“Probably just in passing,” Thomaidis joked about her interaction with Burns over the next day and a half. “(I’ll) congratulate her, she’ll congratulate us. And then it’s down to work, I guess, getting ready to try and stop the other.”
The links between the coaches are long and cannot be broken, especially by just one basketball game. Burns was in her first year as the head coach at McMaster in 1992 when Thomaidis, a Dundas native, was a star forward in her third season.
They bonded then as coach and player, and bonded as friends as they grew to know each other. They will be rivals Saturday, for a couple of hours at least.
“I don’t know if fun is the word.” Thomaidis said. “If it’s going to happen, I wish it was the national final that we’d be playing them. Obviously I have a ton of respect for her and her program, they’re playing really, really well. I thought they looked very dangerous today, shooting the ball very well.
“But again, to play in a national semifinal against your alma mater and your former coach, it’s pretty special. So it will be pretty neat on Saturday.”
Burns is chasing McMaster’s first U Sports women’s basketball title with an old friend in the way.
“We have nothing but respect for each other, we cheer for each other when our teams aren’t in it and when we play each other, it’s always been a great game,” Burns said of Thomaidis and the Huskies. “I think our teams are similar in that the culture that’s on the team is very similar. Her team is classy all the way, everything they do is classy, and we try to instill that in our players as well.”
McMaster, the Ontario champions and No. 2 seed at the nationals, got a career-high 32 points from Sarah Gates to roll past Concordia. Gates made five three-pointers as part of the fast-paced Marauders attack and also got to the freethrow line 14 times.
“Coach Theresa and my other coaches have always just told me to shoot, so if it’s open I’m going to shoot it whether I’m hitting them or not,” Gates said. “Sometimes I get a little mad, but whatever.”
McMaster saw a 19-point lead cut to nine with about five minutes left before holding off the seventh-seeded Stingers.
“There’s a quiet confidence in this group ... we’ve talked about having this aura around this team,” Burns said. “We don’t play scared, we’re confident, we believe in each other, we’re happy, we’re in a good mood — that all goes a long way to being successful.”
It was much the same for No. 2 seed Saskatchewan, which also led by as many as 19 before Acadia got within three with fewer than three minutes remaining.
Acadia’s Haley McDonald, who set an Atlantic University Sport scoring record with 51 points in a conference semifinal a week ago, had 20 points and played the entire 40 minutes for the Axewomen.