The best of the best
Mac hoops star Sarah Gates named top female athlete in Canadian university sports
As she waits in the Calgary airport for her flight home after being named the top female athlete in university sports — covering all sports — she’s presented with a genuine head-scratcher.
Can you name all the awards you’ve won this year?
“In order?” Sarah Gates asks. Sure. In order.
Well, the 24-year-old broke McMaster’s school record for scoring in women’s basketball. When she collected point No. 1,857, she passed her assistant coach Danielle Boiago who’d held the record for a few years. It’s not technically an award per se but she was honoured for the achievement so we’ll count it.
From there, she mentions the first-team Ontario all-star berth. And the Ontario University Athletics MVP nod. Followed by the U Sports first-team all-Canadian honour. And the national women’s basketball MVP award.
So far so good. The weight of all these trophies and plaques are surely testing the structural integrity of her trophy case. But she’s not done.
There was the OUA female athlete of the year. Not just for basketball. For any sport. That was cool.
“And then this one,” the 24-yearold says.
“This one” is the Lois and Doug Mitchell Award that’s given to the best of the best athlete in the country. She claimed it on Wednesday night, beating a cross-country runner from Laval University and a pair of hockey players from the University of New Brunswick and Mount Royal University.
McMaster men have won the honour four times — basketball player Titus Channer (1998) and football players Kojo Aidoo (2001), Jesse Lumsden (2005) and Kyle Quinlan (2013) have all hoisted it — but Gates is the first woman from the school to take it. “The more I think about it, it’s just insane,” she says.
That statement seems about right coming from her. You’d have better luck threading a needle while wearing boxing gloves than extracting any comment from her that might sound self-congratulatory. But hey, at some point it’s impossible not to acknowledge this was a pretty special year. Even for someone who naturally doesn’t do that.
Why did she have so much success?
She’s a great athlete. That’s a good place to start. But, to get from talent to execution, we have to go back to the good ol’ days of COVID. When everything was shut down and gyms were closed and there were no official games or practices, she’d take her ball and walk over to the outdoor basket at Dalewood Middle School and shoot. And shoot and shoot and shoot.
It wasn’t always fun. Often it wasn’t. There were days she wondered about the point of the whole exercise. Sometimes the wind made shooting impossible. Many times a bad bounce off the rim would send her ball bounding away and she’d have to chase it.
And there was the cold. One afternoon she was out there shooting with gloves on.
“It started to hail,” she laughs. “I said, ‘I need to go home.’ ”
In the end though, does she believe that got her here? That discipline and work ethic and unwillingness to stop?
“One hundred per cent,” Gates says.
“It’s all the unseen stuff that puts athletes above other athletes.”
It also explains why she’s starting to get offers from pro teams. So far in Germany and Portugal.
She’s waiting until next month to see what else comes and then she’ll make a decision where she’ll go.
But she’s going. No question about that.
Basketball is going to give her the chance to travel, she says.
Um, it already is. She was in Nova Scotia to win the U Sports hoops MVP. Now Calgary for this award. And then there’s …
“I forgot one,” she interjects. Sorry, one what? “Award,” she says.
“Two actually.”
She also won her team MVP award and McMaster’s female athlete of the year honour.
Hey, the list is long. Too long, it seems, even for her to remember it all. In a year like this, it’s understandable.