When I started coaching two years ago, we could barely get enough girls out on Saturday afternoons to play a game of 5-on-5. We had to restructure the following season because of low numbers. We had less than 30 girls enrolled in and had to combine divisions to run a house league.

Last September we booked the small gym at Holy Trinity for a tryout for girls interested in a travel team. We expected 15 girls to show up. Over 30 girls tried out and we had to kick the boys out of the big gym to run our tryout.

We started our U11 Elite Girls program this January. In March, we traveled to a tournament for the first time. We won all three of our games and took gold in the Mini Girls B Division. The strongest team we played had finished their season ranked 3^rd in a 29-team league in Edmonton. We had proved our team, from a city of 80,000 with no available competition for hundreds of kilometres, could win against teams from major cities.

Fast forward to now. When we look back on our progress, our coaches notice a few things:

• In 12 months we had gone from potentially folding our girls program to being able to compete with the best in Alberta
• In 18 months we had gone from 30 girls in our club to over 30 girls playing elite basketball alone
• In two years, we’ve generated so much interest in our girls programs we’ve reached capacity for all of our house leagues

Yes, we have that many girls who want to play basketball. That makes coaching easy.

To put it simply, we coach these girls because we love the game. Our staff is made up of four dedicated young women. Having an entirely female coaching staff on an elite sports team is rare – Rachel, Meaghan, and I never got to experience it. We know how significant it is for the girls in our program, even though most are too young to understand it. We have a deep understanding of how valuable sport can be for personal development and we want basketball to help the girls as much as it has helped us.

None of our coaches have daughters playing in a Trailblazers program, but we’ve come to refer to the teams as “our girls” despite this. We’ve taken ownership of developing them as athletes, but also realize the positive effects this program can have on their self-esteem (my sister wrote an excellent article about this last month). We’re also developing lifelong skills: teamwork, communication, time management, and problem solving being some of them. My basketball career ended when I was 18, but I used all of these skills to pursue a degree and career in Engineering.

We’re excited to see our girls eventually play at the college and university level. We’re more excited to see these girls develop into strong women at the end of their basketball careers. Elite basketball has made me, and the rest of the coaching staff, the women we are today, and we know the same will be true for the girls in our program.