In a roundabout way, the Carleton Ravens can thank the Guelph Gryphons for this season’s U SPORTS national university women’s basketball championship.
The Ravens were guided to the title by head coach Dani Sinclair in her first full “normal” season with the team. But without the Gryphons in her past, she might never have become interested in basketball in the first place.
“Guelph is where it all began with basketball,” Sinclair, now 43, said in a video interview. “University of Guelph basketball is the reason I got into basketball.”
Her family lived in a house a “stone’s throw” from the university so the family would often walk over to watch the Gryphons play in the old Mitchell Athletics Centre. Those were the glory days of Gryphon men’s basketball and the seating in the old gym went right up to the rafters and they’d be packed with spectators, many arriving during the women’s game to be able to get seats for the men’s game that followed.
“It was back in the days of Tim Mau and Eric Hammond and all those guys,” she recalled. “I've probably told this story a million times, but because we lived so close to the university my parents renovated the basement and we would have three university students live in our basement each year. We had a woman by the name of Caroline Kealey who played on the Gryphons team move into our basement and then my mom asked her to coach the (Grade 8) school team.
“(Then) Caroline formed a club team and we started travelling. She is the one I'd actually credit ... I got interested in starting to go to the games and she taught me how to shoot and how to play and she coached us for a few years.”
While at St. James Catholic High School, Sinclair was active in sports as she played a different sport each season. It was basketball in the fall, volleyball in the winter and soccer in the spring. In the summer she played softball with the Guelph Gators and credits them with teaching her the importance of teamwork.
After St. James, Sinclair played five seasons of university basketball, three with the McMaster Marauders in Hamilton and two with the Victoria Vikes in B.C. She was the Canadian university rookie of the year her first season at McMaster, a first-team all-Canadian at Victoria in her final season and a top scorer on the Victoria team that won the national championship in her first season with the Vikes.
And she was named to the national championship tournament’s all-star team.
That national championship win as a player came 20 years before this year’s national championship win as a coach. While she’s technically just finished her third season as head coach at Carleton, it was actually her first full season with the Ravens after spending eight years as head coach at Victoria.
She joined the Ravens in the spring of 2020 during the pandemic that forced the cancellation of university sports for the 2020-21 school year. Basketball returned for the 2021-22 season, but with a reduced schedule.
“It was an interesting time because I took over the team in May of 2020 and at that point, we were all on lockdown,” Sinclair said. “I met most of these girls over Zoom. It wasn't until August I was able to meet them in person, but for almost a full year we were doing practices with no contact. That was a bit odd, but it did give us a chance to get to know each other better as people. I'm a pretty intense coach and a pretty demanding coach so it's important if you're going to be like that you have to build relationships as well. That year helped us”
Though the Ravens won their second national women’s championship in school history, the team had a pretty slow start to the campaign.
“We had some tough losses in the first half. In the preseason we had some tough losses. We just weren't playing to the level that we wanted to,” Sinclair said. “We hadn't really come together as a team. Some of that was fair because we had so many young players and they had yet to figure out how to play together. We came back after the Christmas break and we had about 10 practices before we went on the road and they were 10 of the best practices we had had all year.
“It's kind of boring because the shift kind of happened with nobody watching. There were no students around. We were going two-a-days and it was over a period of five or six days. We were having lunch together in between practices. Nobody had any schoolwork so we could just focus on each other. Then we came out and we won 12 in a row when we came back in the second half of the season.”
With two national titles in five seasons – the first came in the 2017-18 season – the success of the women’s team pales when compared to Carleton’s men’s team that captured its 17th national title in 20 seasons the same day the women’s team won this year’s U SPORTS crown. The men’s team’s success certainly adds pressure to the women’s team to enjoy its own success.
“In a good way, it does," Sinclair admitted. "The goal is sustainability. Each year is special in its own way and we get to see what the men's program has built. They've had 17 championships in the last 20 years. That's the goal. Not necessarily to win all the championships, but to just have that kind of sustainability so that puts pressure on you."
Sinclair had many coaches during her playing days and some from Guelph often attend her team’s games in the area just to reconnect with their former player.
“I have many, many coaches that helped me along the way, both as a player and then also when I got into coaching as mentors,” she said. “I credit them a lot for what I was able to accomplish as a player, but... some of the advice I got from each of them when I was coming up as a coach is that you have to be yourself, you can't try to be like anybody else as coach. You have to coach with your own personality and be genuine, otherwise it just doesn't work.”
Now Sinclair and the Ravens are looking ahead to next year.
“One of the things you learn when you're here at Carleton where there've been so many championships, there's not really any talk around winning championships,” she said. “The talk is around daily excellence and pushing each other and having really, hard tough practices every day. That part of it is hard. There's a lot of hard work, but you also talk about redefining your fun and the fun comes from the work. I love that.
“Even now there's no sense of contentment. It's, 'OK, can we do it again?' It's pressure but it's good pressure.”
