“A WEAPON ALL OVER THE COURT”
I
t was pouring rain in Kingston, Ont., and Aaliyah Edwards was driving to the bucket on a cement slab in her family’s backyard. She and her dad, Eddie, had made the basketball court earlier that day, putting up the hoop and painting red free-throw and three-point lines. But not long after the paint dried and Edwards started draining her first shots, down came the rain. Her mom, Jackie, saw her 15-year-old daughter getting soaked in the backyard, so she tried to intervene.
“Aaliyah!” Jackie yelled. “You’ve got to get out of the rain!” Edwards looked at her mom, who’d been her first competitive basketball coach, and calmly explained: “I’m working on a new move.” She got back to it, and minutes later, Eddie joined and started rebounding for her. Jackie laughed and took out her phone to record them playing in the rain.
It’s a moment that still stands out to Jackie years later, one she feels says a lot about her youngest child. Edwards always worked hard and always had to finish what she started. Jackie laughs remembering another: When Edwards, taking a year of tap, jazz and ballet at age nine, told her dance instructor: “I’m not a ballerina, but all that footwork is going to help me become a great basketball player.”
That effort — and the fancy footwork — did the trick. Earlier this season, Edwards was selected by the Washington Mystics sixth overall in the WNBA draft, the highest a Canadian has ever been taken. Through to the Olympic break, the former University of Connecticut star ranks top five among first-year players in blocks and rebounds, and her name is up there with Angel Reese’s and Caitlin Clark’s as the top Rookie of the Year candidates in a stacked class.
Soon, the forward with the purple and yellow braids, the mega-watt smile and the face shield she’s worn in games since she broke her nose two years ago will be back on a global stage, playing in her second Olympic Games. And just as she has adapted quickly to the pro ranks, Edwards will look to hit the ground running in France, aiming to help her country make history. If you ask the Mystics forward, she’s “so different” as a player than she was in Tokyo three years ago, now boasting more experience, confidence and skill. As Team Canada point guard Shay Colley puts it, “Aaliyah is a weapon — all over the court.” That’s welcome news to a fifth-ranked team looking to become the first Canadian women to win an Olympic basketball medal. “We’re all coming in with a new energy,” Edwards says. “And a real hunger to get on that podium.”
C
oach Fabienne Blizzard had already named Ontario’s U15 team for the 2016 national championship when she heard about a 13-year-old old who would have cracked the roster if only she’d known about the tryouts. Blizzard got the tip from a Basketball Canada staffer based in Kingston, and though she wouldn’t take a player who hadn’t tried out, the coach decided to make the two-hour drive from Ottawa to see Aaliyah Edwards for herself.
She watched five minutes of Edwards playing for her Kingston Impact and Blizzard’s scouting mission was complete. “Oh my gosh — defensively, she was a monster,” the coach says now. “I’ll never forget, she’s in the middle of the floor stealing the ball from someone, then scoring, again and again. It was like a clinic. I was sold.”
Blizzard was used to seeing talented young players focus solely on scoring, but here was a kid who played defence first, and turned it into offence. As the coach later discovered, Edwards learned that approach from her oldest brother, Jermaine, 14 years her senior, who, in his wisdom, emphasized that style of play.
“I always knew if I did my work on defence, I could end up with the ball, and I could give it to my teammates or get a bucket at the other end of the court, and I took pride in that,” Edwards explains. “I think that’s why I never liked playing one-on-one with my oldest brother, because he was one of the best defenders ever. He outsmarted you on every play, and I think maybe I got some of that from him. He was always in the gym telling me: ‘Do your work early, so you have an opportunity on the offensive end.’”
For Blizzard, seeing Edwards’ skill and basketball IQ at 13 underlined her belief that a U14 team was essential to growing Ontario’s provincial program. She made a call to the provincial association and was told if she could find a coach, they would back the expansion. “So, I got on the horn and found a coach,” Blizzard says, with a laugh. That summer, she invited Edwards to a training camp for the new team.
Edwards was a multi-sport athlete who also starred in volleyball and track and field (her dad was a star hurdler as a kid in Jamaica, and coached her in hurdles and triple jump). She didn’t play rep basketball until she was 11 or 12 and joined her first Impact squad, coached by Jackie and Jermaine. “We were the underdog, and people would see the Impact on the schedule of the tournament and be like, ‘Oh, that’s an easy ‘W,’ but no, we went out and won bronze that year,” says Edwards, who’s still good friends with a bunch of those fellow underdogs. “That’s when I really fell in love with being a great teammate, playing for the person beside you, and developing that will to win.”
Attending that first U14 provincial camp only grew that will, because Edwards found herself surrounded by elite players for the first time. “When she came back from that camp, there was a look in her eye of ‘I want this. I’m going to go for this,’” Jackie says. “I noticed a shift in her relentlessness, her competitiveness, her commitment to the sport.” Edwards had always practiced hard, but now she trained hard outside of practice, too: going on five-kilometre runs in the mornings with her dad, jumping rope and doing push-ups and sit-ups after school.