Big Read: Lisa Thomaidis has already cemented her status as one of the greatest basketball coaches in Canadian history. Now, she and the senior women’s national team have their sights set on an elusive goal — the Olympic podium. ✍️: michaelgrange
Lisa Thomaidis has already cemented her status as one of the greatest basketball coaches in Canadian history. Now, she and the senior women’s national team have their sights set on an elusive goal — the Olympic podiumiles from home, in the midst of the long, dark cold of her first prairie winter, the losses mounted, her already fragile confidence waned, and the dreams would come.
“I mean, she’s got to be one of our greatest coaches ever in Canada,” says McNeill, who hired Thomaidis as an assistant when the program was languishing in the mid-20s in the FIBA World Rankings. “I think easily I can say that…. There’s no one in Canada that has more international experience than her…. There’s no on the men’s side with that kind of international experience.
“There was this group of us that just kind of went from sport to sport to sport, and had some pretty good success, and that was uncommon at the time — the school wasn’t known for any sort of athletic success,” says Thomaidis. “But we had these great Phys Ed teachers that wound up being our coaches in volleyball and basketball and soccer, and there was me who was six-two and another good friend who was six-one and another who was five-11 — it was kind of crazy.
She was trepidatious: “I remember getting on the flight from Toronto thinking, ‘Well, I’ll be back here in no time.’” “I think people liked her; she respected you as an athlete before she even knew you, almost, so that helped,” says Ali Fairbrother, a fifth-year senior on Thomaidis’s first team in Saskatoon who joined her staff as an assistant after graduating. “But I remember her walking into that gym and thinking, right away:. And I don’t know what exactly it is. Maybe it’s confidence? She sets a tone.
When the world stopped in March 2020, Thomaidis returned home. The past two decades had been more like 40 seasons than 20, with the coach continuously shifting from the fall-winter-spring cycle with the Huskies to summers with the national team.
“I was probably really close to burnout, if not in the midst of it,” she says. “March hit, and I was just starting to come down off of all of that and reality started to hit. It really dawned on me what was going on in my life at that point in time.” Her mother’s death was especially difficult to process, and being home with the time, space and support to work through it was vital. Her mom knew nothing about sports, but recognized her daughter’s passion. And once it became clear that Thomaidis wasn’t moving back from Saskatoon any time soon and that her summers would be busy with national team work, Sandra chose to support her daughter anyway she could.
On the floor Thomaidis’s challenges were different than those facing her predecessors. She took over a team that was ready to make the leap from good to great. Success came quickly: a fifth-place finish at the World Championships in 2014, a gold medal at the Pan Am Games in Toronto in 2015 and a win at the Tournament of the Americas in Edmonton that same summer to qualify for the Olympics in 2016.
“If you’re really good defensively — and they are, I watched a lot of their games — you need to turn some of that defence into offence. So let’s get out and run,” says Finch. “But you have to run with a purpose. When you push and you run and you want to be unpredictable, you still have some sort of structure you’re flowing into — otherwise it’s not seamless.
But making technical changes heading into the biggest competition the program has ever had? During a pandemic? When the team hasn’t been able to train together for more than a year? It takes a certain kind of courage and confidence, something Finch picked up on quickly over regular Zoom calls and text messages this past winter.
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