Local coaches open the door for women in sport

Opinion

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This article was published 25/02/2025 (229 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

These days, Caitlin Clark is everywhere. As a basketball player, athlete and a woman, she’s a constant presence in sports media and pop culture. This year, she was at the centre of Nike’s Superbowl ad, some of the most expensive advertising in the world.

Before turning pro, she electrified fans of college basketball, with her Iowa Hawkeyes, seeing twice the away-game attendance compared to their conference rivals and drove the sellout of the Big Ten Women’s Basketball Tournament. The ripple effects have been felt here in Canada, with a $115-million deal signed last May to bring the first WNBA franchise to Toronto by 2026.

It’s hard not to get excited about the momentum. It may change the game for a generation of young girls with a superstar role model lighting up the courts alongside an unprecedented spotlight on women’s pro sports. From where I sit, it’s a total thrill.

As a small-town kid growing up in the Canadian Prairies in the 1980s and early ’90s, it would have been hard to imagine female athletes getting this much mainstream attention. While I wasn’t without natural talent, the odds were stacked against me finding someone who would push me to the next level athletically.

The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) was still years away from creation. The NBA was also yet to open its first Canadian franchise in the mid-’90s, leaving Canada a comparatively sleepy basketball backwater, despite laying claim to the sport’s founding father.

Still, I loved using my height to sink baskets. Waking up at 6:30 a.m. on weekends to get ready in the dim morning light for a tournament wasn’t hard. There were moments when I wondered why I was even doing it, but there was a difference for me. I had a coach who was dedicated to seeing our team — and us — succeed.

If I close my eyes today, I can still see our coach, Dave Boch, moving up and down the court sidelines, clutching his notebook and pen. The basketball thudding, my heart pounding in my ears so loudly I could hear nothing else but his voice directing the play.

His enthusiasm was contagious — I gave everything I had to stay on top of that ball. I can remember him saying once to a teammate jokingly, “she’s going to have a heart attack,” after I had been running up and down the court so hard throughout the game, my face beet red. That 13-year-old me wasn’t going to give an inch to the other side.

I still wonder what would have been if it wasn’t for the coach. Without a lot of role models in women’s basketball or pro leagues then, I’m not so sure I would have been as eager to push myself to get better at the sport. Representation matters, it shows us what’s possible and it’s the seed of inspiration.

As an adult, I understand now how important it is to have something you’ve worked hard to become good at. It becomes a jewel of self-confidence, knowing that you have a talent. I see now that this is where my sense of self-competition came from. Where I learned that if I put my mind to something and pushed hard enough, I could be the best, or more accurately: my personal best. The heat of the game and the pressure to perform got into my blood and is still with me today, when life throws the inevitable curveballs.

And whether someone makes it to the top or not, I learned that it didn’t matter. Sports teach you how to be humbled by failure and focused under pressure. They show you the importance of building relationships with people to achieve what is not possible alone. And most importantly, they teach you about the power of persistence over necessary failures.

But what I’m most grateful for, given the era in women’s basketball when I grew up, is that my coach made a serious commitment to our team’s success. He taught us about dedication through his courtside talks and impressed on us how effort counted.

I still count on those early basketball memories to this day in my forties. It’s the voice of the coach I can hear when I know I’ll need to work harder to get a result, interwoven with my self-talk.

As all eyes are on women’s basketball today, I couldn’t be happier for girls around the world, who turn out to basketball courts with pride and purpose or wear Caitlin’s jersey. And as the ground keeps shifting, I only hope to expect that more coaches like mine will show up and take natural talent to the next level so more women will have the lifelong benefit of understanding that the most important courtside talk we will have is the one we keep having with ourselves.

Jennifer Lee is a Winnipeg-born, Toronto-based writer and communications professional. Find her on BlueSky and Instagram @jenleeitsme.