Cagers facing crunch time

WATERLOO— Failure to play in the world championships next summer would simply be too costly, too devastating for a Canadian women’s basketball program that’s on the rise.

“ It’s crucial,” said head coach Allison McNeil, whose team is off to Dominican Republic and the FIBA Americas qualification tournament next week. Three of six teams will qualify from the round- robin tournament in Santo Domingo, Sept. 14- 18. The price of not qualifying would reverberate long after this year, McNeil said.

“ It’s not just missing out going to the worlds when you don’t go, it’s missing out on all the exhibition games before, all the training time, all the funding you get,” she said before playing Puerto Rico in an exhibition series here this week.

“ All of sudden, it doesn’t put your program a year behind, it puts you another two or four years behind.” And all training camps and exhibition games next summer can’t make up for missing real and significant competition.

“ Last summer, ( after) we didn’t qualify for the ( Athens) Olympics, we got a 21⁄ 2- week training camp and four games against Japan. You don’t think that hurt?” Of course, that’s exactly the predicament the national men’s team is facing next summer after it failed to qualify for the worlds. And there are several parallels between the team McNeil is taking to Santo Domingo and the men’s team that failed to qualify under firstyear coach Leo Rautins. Only six of the players on the women’s team have been in as much as a qualifying event and only four — Toronto’s Tammy Sutton- Brown, Nikki Johnson of Niagara Falls, Teresa Kleindienst of Abbotsford, B. C. and Claudia Brassard of La Malbaie, Que. — remain from the 2000 Sydney Olympic team.