Maritimes a perfect place to start a Canadian pro women's basketball league

This is a column by Shireen Ahmed, who writes opinion for CBC Sports. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

Many years ago, I stood after practice with the University of Toronto women's soccer team and heard a discussion the coaches were having. The USports (then called CIAU) women's soccer playoffs were happening and Dalhousie University advanced by beating schools in Ontario and Quebec.

"No fish towns should be beating Ontario schools," our head coach said haughtily.

That comment stayed with me for a long time. I come from the East Coast and I had acquaintances and former teammates on that squad. I also know of the incredible athleticism that lives and grows there. So the rise of a regional women's professional basketball league, the Maritime Women's Basketball Association, doesn't surprise me. 

Canada is the only elite FIBA-associated basketball nation that does not have a domestic league for women's basketball. But in 2020, as the world was trying to cope with a global pandemic, Brad Janes was plotting how to bring elite women's basketball to the Maritimes. He asked Tasia McKenna to be his co-conspirator and serve as commissioner of the league.

McKenna, a former star at Lakehead University, is a high-performance coach and was the technical director of Basketball Nova Scotia. Her day job is as a program manager at Canadian Women and Sport (CWS) where she is responsible for creating the gender equity playbook used by sports organizations all over Canada. 

McKenna recalls that Janes literally drew out his plans on a napkin for what was required to start a sustainable women's basketball league on the East Coast. There would be six teams, four in Nova Scotia and two in New Brunswick. The