Canada’s women’s basketball team heads into a summer full of opportunity

There was a brief pause before Lisa Thomaidis took a deep breath and exhaled before breaking into a chuckle.

It was almost as if she paused to reflect and look back on her last 13 years with the Canadian senior women’s national basketball team.

“There were days back when I first started where we didn’t know if we were ever going to get to this point,” she said over the phone.

Thomaidis has only been the head coach of the national women’s team since 2013, but she’s been part of the staff since 2002 – she worked as an assistant under both Bev Smith and Allison McNeill – and as far as holding positive on-court memories in her time with the program, there isn’t exactly a large archive.

The team failed to qualify for the Olympics in 2004 and 2008. It had dismal finishes at both the 2006 and 2010 world championships.

Over the last few years, though, while much of the discussion has revolved around their male counterparts and their Olympic medal potential, the tide has begun to shift for the women’s program. Canada finished eighth at the London Olympics in 2012 – it was the first time they’d ever reached the quarterfinals at the Olympics – and they followed that up with a respectable fifth-place finish at the 2014 world championships.

Now, heading into a summer where they’ll compete on home soil at both the PanAm Games (July 16-20) and the FIBA Americas championships - which will also serve as the Olympic qualifier (Aug 9-16) - the program is looking to build on that positive momentum. And they seem equipped do so with a roster that many are calling their most talented roster in decades. Veterans Kim Gaucher, 31, Tamara Tatham, 29, Shona Thorburn, 32, and Lizanne Murphy, 31, lead the way for Canada and are joined by a group of rising stars in Kia Nurse, 19, Shay Colley, 19 and Nirra Fields, 21, that appear ready to help bring the program to new heights.

Nurse is coming off a memorable rookie season at the University of Connecticut where she helped the Huskies to a national championship while averaging 10.2 points per game; Colley is getting set to join the South Carolina Gamecocks as a rookie next season and Fields recently finished her sophomore season at UCLA where she led all Bruins players, averaging 15 points per game.

The arrival of young stars has allowed Canada to completely alter its playing style. A team that once relied heavily on its airtight defence to win games is now capable of playing a much more run-and-gun style and show some flair on offence.

“Our success in 2012 and leading up to then was really predicated on ball control and really taking care of the basketball and a very deliberate and intelligent approach to offence,” Thomaidis said. “We weren’t really able to push the tempo and that was due in large part to the personnel we had and the style of play that we needed to employ to be successful… [Now] we have some younger players that play a bit more of a dynamic style.

“We’re always looking to evolve and improve. We’re trying to play a bit of a faster pace but still maintain some of the concepts and principles that we did have that made us successful and got us to this level… We’ve always been known as a world-class defensive team and that’s really important to us to maintain that as we move forward and make some of these changes on the offensive end.”

The rise of the women’s team is no fluke.

Thomaidis pointed to how much things have changed on the player development side over the last decade to ensure that younger players are prepared should they ever get the chance to represent Canada at the senior level. She says top talent is now being identified at a very young age and the concepts being taught to young players are similar to the ones being used at the high-performance level.

“That’s the biggest piece that has changed in our system,” Thomaidis said. Right now from the athlete identification, recruitment, retainment and development, it is a very systematic approach. Ten or 15 years ago we were hoping to get the best athletes… [but] there wasn’t too much development in the way of national team programming at the age groups we have now.

“The transition from one age group to the next to the next is seamless and that’s why you’re seeing players like the Shay Colleys and the Kia Nurses being able to step into the senior team and actually play a role and make that team because they’re much better prepared to take that step.”

And the changes that have been made on the player development side are leading to meaningful results on the court. Last weekend the Cadette women’s national team became the first-ever Canadian national team to win a FIBA Americas tournament, capturing gold at the U16 FIBA Americas championships in Mexico.

Funding has also been instrumental in getting the program to where it is now. After qualifying for the world championships in 2010, the program received $1.8 million in funding from Own the Podium, a program designed to dole out money to specific sports based on Olympic medal potential.

“What you can do with that increased funding – the human resources, the manpower, the knowledge, the commitment to being able to hire staff on a full-time basis – it makes a world of difference. Probably the single biggest thing is the level of support on video and scouting and just how quickly we can turn that around both from a scouting standpoint for opponents but mostly from a learning and development piece with our individual athletes.

“Being able to turn around film immediately after a training session or immediately after a game, for players to come and get that immediate feedback and be able to see their footage and be able to make adjustments.”

Michelle O’Keefe, the president and CEO of Canada Basketball, says there are conversations happening around the office now, specifically around analytics, that “you wouldn’t have even dreamed of 10 to 15 years ago.”

“Who on earth would have ever sat there and done diagnostic research on why you have a certain number of turnovers, what those turnovers look like and how you stop having those specific turnovers from happening?”

Thomaidis understands that playing two tournaments this summer on home soil – the PanAms in Toronto and the FIBA Americas championships in Edmonton – undoubtedly puts added pressure on her team. She knows, however, it also presents an incredible opportunity for both her team and the program as a whole.

“It’s a chance to showcase our program, our team and some of these athletes and individuals who’ve worked most of their life to get to this point,” she said. “And even beyond this team it’s a great chance for our program to be seen and be known.”