Image Credit: Basketball Canada

By Adam Donnelly

CANADA BASKETBALL WNT

Women’s national basketball team head coach optimistic heading into Olympic qualifying

Nov 29, 2019 | 5:24 PM

KAMLOOPS — Another day, another gym for Lisa Thomaidis. The University of Saskatchewan Huskies Women’s basketball head coach is one of the most decorated in all of USports — which is one reason she’s also the head coach of the Canadian Women’s national team, which was just ranked fourth in the most recent FIBA rankings.

“We’re really excited to be ranked fourth in the world. It’s the highest our program has ever been ranked,” Thomaidis says. “It shows a level of respect for what we’ve been doing and reflects some of the performances we’ve had over the last few years.”

Some of those recent performances include a Gold Medal at the 2015 Pan Am Games, a Gold Medal at the 2015 FIBA Americas event, and a fifth-place finish at the 2018 World Championships. All that international success has been in preparation for the 2020 Olympics. However, the team still has to qualify at a tournament in Belgium early in the new year.

“We play Japan, Belgium, and Sweden, and we have to finish top-three out of those four,” Thomaidis explains. “We’ve got a great group of athletes. They’re all playing in leagues around the world. We’ll all get together in Belgium and make that push for Tokyo qualification.”

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One reason for the international success is a stable of great young athletes who have grown up together on the court for the national program.

“We really try and get out athletes together at a younger age, and before we get to these qualifying tournaments,” she says. “For the last four years, they’ve all come together, and they all give up time in the summers to play together, and to gain that experience and to come together and really have that cohesive unit. When we do get together for short periods of time, it’s not a bunch of new people coming together; they have a lot of history, they’ve had a lot of success together. That really pays off in tournaments like the ones coming up where we don’t have a lot of time together.”

Despite the success and the recognition on the world stage, Thomaidis isn’t taking anything for granted. She wants to ensure her team is ready for the qualification tournament in February before they look ahead to the Tokyo Olympics in the summer of 2020.

“The goal first and foremost is to get there. We’ve got a huge task ahead of us in February, to go to Belgium and knock off some of these best teams in the world just to get to Tokyo,” Thomaidis says. “On the women’s side, there’s a ton of parity. There’s a lot of strong teams. For us, that’ll be the first test, and we’ve got to pass that before we think about Tokyo.”