By Jackson Starr
As Canadian high schoolers get ready for the start of their new prep circuit basketball season, there aren’t many with better summertime stories to share than Jahda Denis, Rachael Okokoh and Fabienne Blizzard of the Capital Courts Academy.
Denis and Okokoh played a solid supporting role as Canada achieved its best-ever finish at the FIBA Under-17 Women’s World Cup, while Blizzard was named the tournament’s top coach.
“Let’s make history” was the team’s rallying cry from the start of the summer, signals Blizzard.
“I said, ‘No one’s expecting Canada to finish on top. Why don’t we prove them wrong?'” she recounts. “They were just hungry about that; I didn’t have to coach effort. I didn’t have to coach the values, the culture.
“They were just amazing people to work with. Probably the easiest group that I’ve ever had.”
At the July 13-21 World Cup in Mexico, Canada won six consecutive games to reach the championship game before taking the silver medal behind powerhouse USA.
The Canadians handled their group phase opponents with ease, their closest match being a 16-point victory over France, alongside blowout wins over Egypt and Taiwan.
Canada easily dispatched Puerto Rico and Finland to reach the medal round and then outlasted Spain 77-73 in the semi-final.
The Canadians trailed after every quarter except the last one against Spain, boosted by a 23-16 advantage in the final frame to ensure their spot on the podium.
Canada was one of just two teams to come within 20 points of the Americans, who took the final 84-64.
Okokoh led the team in offensive rebounds while averaging 13.7 minutes of floor time per game, while Denis played 17.6 minutes and scored 6.9 points per game.
Blizzard said in a Canada Basketball statement after the event that it was “a special team.”
“I feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to coach one of the most talented group of athletes in Canada,” she indicated. “Their compete fire was insane, on and off the floor. It is rare you have 12 young athletes within this type of mindset. The future is so bright.”
Reflecting later in conversation with the Ottawa Sports Pages, Blizzard says the most important part of her success coaching the team was preparation.
“When I was offered the position, I started watching the other teams, starting in October, just in terms of their tendencies, the play of their core players, and starting to even create my own scout on them,” outlines the coach who was led the same group to a FIBA Americas U16 Women’s Basketball Championship silver medal the previous summer.
Once the players gathered for training camp, Blizzard’s first task was building team culture.
“The way I did that is I targeted the players, every one of them had to present their identity and culture. That means, who are you and what’s your culture at home?” she explains. “That gave us a core, because a lot of the core is the same for a lot of people… and how do we integrate that into the Canada Basketball culture that we want to form for us to get to the final goal?”
On-court training was an imperative part alongside the culture, and assigning athletes different roles on the court.
“We just found very creative ways to do things where we only have a certain amount of time,” Blizzard notes. “The big thing is going to be to always focus on people’s strengths and making sure people accept the role that they’re going to have on this team, even though they have a bigger role on their respective teams.”
What the team couldn’t quite prepare for was a flu bug and food poisoning that spread through the team and its staff.
“It was bad,” Blizzard recalls. “I was trying to coach and come back and we’re wearing masks and coughing and can’t breathe. It started with some of our athletes and went through most of us.
“People don’t know that these things were happening behind the scenes, and the resiliency and being able to have each other’s back was at the highest level.”
These illnesses forced adjustments, with Blizzard using multiple players and different rotations throughout the tournament.
“Everyone just really covered for each other really well,” she underlines. “When you have a bunch of all-stars, they like getting them to understand what their role is, and being able to step up when people are not able to be there, to me, that was a huge highlight.
“They’re 16, 17 years old, and they’re already acting like pros.”
In her 30th year since her first coaching gig as an assistant for the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees she previously played for, Blizzard still found learning moments from her experience at the world tournament.
“I remember when we played Spain, I think we over-scouted,” she reflects. “You basically have one night to get ready for the game and I think at the end of the day, you gotta keep it simple.
“They’re 16, 17 years old, they have a good base of basketball IQ. Now let’s focus on us. What we do well, and then make adjustments on the fly, because these kids were really good at adjusting on the fly.”
Blizzard was pleased to have a pair of local players with her on Team Canada.
Denis and Okokoh followed in the footsteps of others such as Paris 2024 Olympian Cassandre Prosper, who joined Capital Courts Academy from Montreal and now plays at the University of Notre Dame, and Ottawa’s Merissah Russell, who is currently working on her graduate degree while playing in the NCAA for the University of Louisville.
“It started with Merissah back in the day with Ottawa, where she was our first national team player,” Blizzard highlights. “That was the big mandate, especially when I started back with the (Gloucester) Wolverines, where we said, we gotta get kids from Ottawa seen, and that’s always been something that I found, the community has been really good at helping me, because I wouldn’t be able to do this without the community.”
Now settled back into the familiar confines of Cairine Wilson Secondary School, it’s back to basics for Blizzard as she works towards another big season with CCA, who have occupied each step of the podium in the Ontario Scholastic Basketball Association the past three years (silver in 2024, bronze in 2023 and gold in 2022).
“I’m going to continue to build on what we have, especially looking at what they’ve been doing on the international platform,” she says. “We’re constantly working on some of the things that they’re going to do. We’re going to need to know how to go through screen actions. We’re going to need to know how to move without the ball. All of these things become a priority.”