Upstart Maritime basketball league hopes to keep women on the court

The Maritime Women's Basketball Association (MWBA) was made for people like Ellen Hatt.

Hatt, a 25 year old from Halifax, finished her four-year run on the Acadia women's basketball team in 2019.

Graduation, however, brought an abrupt end to her basketball career.

"It was such an identity for me. But there was no other space for me to go and play," Hatt said.

Enter the MWBA, an amateur league founded by former Basketball New Brunswick president Brad Janes.

About two years after its conception, MWBA play is set to open on Saturday with six teams from across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia all hitting the court at Leo Hayes High School in Fredericton.

Hatt's team, the Halifax Thunder, will play the first game in league history against the Moncton Mystics at 2 p.m. ET. The season runs until the final weekend of June, when the playoffs will be held at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.

Hatt said there was "no doubt" in her mind that when the Thunder, which also have a competitive high school travel team she used to play on, added an MWBA squad that she would join.

Besides, the league fills that basketball gap she's been missing for three years.

"It provides a place for women to keep playing because we see that a lot in sport where there aren't these other avenues for women to keep developing," Hatt said.

In the early days of the pandemic, Janes joined a Zoom call organized by a local coach and featuring a Q&A with Canada's then-women's basketball coach Lisa Thomaidis.

"One of the questions was how can Canada continue to rise in the world rankings?" Janes recalled. "And Lisa said, 'We're the only top-ranked FIBA nation that doesn't have a domestic pro league.' And that really stuck out."

And so Janes started jotting stuff down