Great Canadian hoops legacies getting carried forward by Alexander, Hill

If all goes according to plan, the fullest expression of the ongoing story of Canadian basketball will play out in Tokyo in early August, with a group of talented women hearing the anthem as they stand on the podium with Olympic medals draped around their necks.

Their respective paths to the senior women’s team – ranked fourth in the world – are all different, as might be expected given a collection of athletes ranging in age from 19-37 with roots spread widely across a big country.

But the Canadian basketball community can feel small sometimes, too.

As much as the sport has exploded in recent years – from grassroots participation all the way to the impact Canadians are having in the WNBA and NBA – it doesn’t seem all that long ago that basketball success wasn’t measured in draft picks and contracts, but in bragging rights and the word-of-mouth reverence afforded to local stars.

The women’s roster offers reminders of that version of the story too, with Kayla Alexander and Sami Hill’s backgrounds, in particular, jumping out to my eye.

Alexander is an imposing six-foot-four centre from Milton, Ont., who was the all-time leading scorer when she graduated from Syracuse in 2013, earning her the eighth-overall selection in that year’s WNBA draft. She has played eight seasons for three teams in the world’s best women’s league and will be making her first Olympic appearance for Canada when they open their tournament July 26 against Serbia.

Hill is a do-everything five-foot-10 guard from Toronto that starred at Virginia Tech and played a key role in Canada’s win at the Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Belgium in February of 2020. She has played five seasons with the senior team and is with the team in Japan as one of two alternates on the Olympic roster.

But for all their own accomplishments, they each have the experience of being routinely reminded of the basketball ties shared by their fathers who made their marks in the Toronto basketball community in a very different time by making plays that live vividly in the mind’s eye of those lucky enough to see them, but nowhere else.

It’s no stretch to say their fathers – Joe Alexander and Sam Hill – were Toronto hoops legends in a pivotal era for the sport in the city.

As the two senior team members grew up, they couldn’t help but hear about it.

They just couldn’t always quite fathom why.

“I knew about him because I’ve heard people tell me all the time, like, ‘The Joe Alexander? That’s your father?’ he used to jump out of the gym, blah, blah, blah,’” said Kayla. “But I’ve never actually seen game footage, or evidence.

“I knew he had hops because when I was younger and I was starting to play basketball he would work out with me and I saw him dunk many times. He was, like, a younger guy then, but I’ve had many people tell me and his friends always told me, ‘Your father used to ball out.’”

Samantha (Sami) Hill had the same experience.

“I loved it when we walked into a gym and a bunch of people were like, ‘Hey, you’re Sam Hill’s daughter? Sam Hill who used to play at Jarvis [Collegiate] or who used to play at [the University of Toronto]?” she said. “And when I was in my younger teenaged years and didn’t really want to listen to my dad, it almost validated him even more, like ‘Wow, maybe I should be listening to this guy.’”

He would have stories.

Sam Hill was a high-flying, six-foot-three point guard who was always a threat to split the defence and bring the house down with a dunk through traffic. A play just like that at the City vs. Suburbs All-Star Game in front of a sold-out crowd of 2,400 at York University in 1982 still gets talked about among those lucky enough to see it – myself being one.

“I still remember that whole play, from the moment I got the ball on the inbounds and started dribbling up the floor,” said Sam.

Meanwhile, Joe Alexander is almost as meaningful as a symbol of the evolving Toronto basketball story as he was a player.

He was the foundational talent of the Eastern Commerce high school dynasty that shaped so much of Toronto’s basketball history in the decades that followed. At six-foot-five he had long arms and the kind of jumping ability that allowed him to play above the rim.

The first time I saw him play he finished an alley-oop pass from half-court. It was 1979 and he was in 11th grade. I was 12 years old and never forgot it.

Does he happen to remember it?

“Not that play in particular,” said Joe.

In fairness, he had a lot of great plays to remember.

But he also had a soft, high-arching jumper and cool demeanour that never changed no matter how intense the moment. He went on to star at Niagara University at a time when Canadians playing NCAA Division I basketball was relatively rare.

Sam and Joe’s teams butted heads throughout their high school careers and they were both named city all-stars. They met in the finals of the 1982 city championships and again at the “Metro” Toronto championships, with Eastern coming out on top each time.

Both schools advanced to the provincials. Jarvis lost in the semifinals but Alexander led Eastern to the Ontario title with 38 points in the final, the first provincial championship won by a Toronto school in more than 20 years at the time.

It was, in many ways, the leaping-off point for an era where Toronto schools dominated the province with programs like Runnymede and Oakwood vying with Eastern for local hegemony.

The growth of Canadian basketball is often attributed – with good reason – to the establishment of the Toronto Raptors in 1995 or the emergence of Vince Carter and then Victoria’s Steve Nash as NBA stars in the early 2000s, but the roots of the game run much deeper.

There were men’s and women’s dynasties assembled at the University of Victoria well before the Raptors logo existed; rivalries in the old Great Plains Athletic Conference played out across Manitoba and Saskatchewan and northern Ontario with Brandon University eventually rising to prominence while Atlantic Canada was a basketball hotbed to itself that would envelope the rest of the country when Halifax hosted the national university championships every year.

But with the Greater Toronto Area the source of so much of Canada’s elite basketball talent in the decades since, the case can be made that the country’s recent basketball story is very much Toronto’s and its formative chapters were being written in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with Joe and Sam among the noteworthy protagonists.

The flavour of the city was changing in large part due to a wave of immigration from the Caribbean that began in the 1970s. All the best basketball was played in school as AAU basketball hadn’t arrived and the idea of leaving the city to play high school basketball in the United States hadn’t been considered. Ontario still had Grade 13, so the best players were often 19 or even 20 years old. The city was bursting at the seams with unrealized talent and their battlegrounds were the small city gyms with crowds of hundreds that felt like thousands, or thousands that felt like 10 times that amount.

“Those are absolutely my best high school memories,” said Joe, 59, a recently retired Ontario Provincial Police officer, whose son Kyle had a two-way contract with the Miami Heat and was a candidate for the men’s national team this summer.

“The [late] Marv Pearl would host the Jarvis Tournament and the city championships, and the gym was always packed. I can actually lie in bed and think about how much fun it was showing up there and the place was full and then running out onto the court.

“It was like playing in an NCAA game. It was so much fun and I miss those days. They were by far the most exciting, competitive days of my life. It was fun basketball back then.”

Sam’s memories are no different.

“Somebody always had a boombox rigged into the sound system on the scorers’ bench somewhere,” said Hill, whose younger daughter Kate played Division I basketball at LaSalle University and whose oldest son Alex is the all-time scoring leader at the University of Toronto. “And it always had the latest [and earliest] hip-hop songs – Kurtis Blow or whatever – just booming out and people lined up outside the gym, waiting to get in, and when you walked in there and got to play? Like, forget it. It was electric.”

Some of the most memorable games came against each other.

“Those Jarvis teams were really good,” Joe recalled. “Sam had a great game – he could drive, pass, pull-up – he could do it all. They were one of the teams that actually put doubt in my mind. ‘Can we beat these guys? They’re pretty good.’ We had to play our best to beat them.”

And Joe was the biggest reason why they usually did.

“Joe was a next-level athlete and basketball player who had a tremendous ability to rise to the moment,” said Sam, who was a provincial all-star at the University of Toronto before becoming a lawyer. “I do not recall him ever having a bad game. He might’ve had quiet moments when he let his teammates do their thing, but when a big bucket, defensive stop, key block or momentum-changing dunk was needed, he always would step up – particularly with those ridiculous power dunks. And he was the nicest, most unassuming guy.”

It’s a side of their fathers their accomplished daughters can only muse about, since it happened in an era before camera phones, the Internet or even VCRs.

“Me and Kayla were talking about how much we would have enjoyed seeing them play in their prime, like being a fly on the wall at their high school games, just to see what they were really like,” said Sami, who used to pass a framed photograph of Joe on the way into the gym when she played her high school basketball at Eastern Commerce before heading to New Jersey for prep school and, eventually, earning her scholarship.

“We hear the stories, we see the photos, but we don’t have any video evidence so we don’t even really know what their games are like and we just wish we could watch.”

Instead, it’s their fathers who have had a second basketball life through their star daughters and now will be watching as their legacies get lived out on the grandest stage of all, on a continent far away against the best on the planet.

“It’s phenomenal, as a parent, but [Sami] is a product of our family,” says Sam, pointing out that his wife, Pam Prophet was a national champion triple-jumper at U of T, which sparks a debate about where Sami gets her hops from. “But there was no real pressure about, ‘You got to do this, you got to do that.’ It was just, ‘If you want to be any good, you have to work really hard and do the best you can.’”

Joe never pressured Kayla to pursue basketball – she was introduced to it by a school friend at age 12 – but dove in with support when she did.

When she made the Olympic roster after being so close for so many years, it was her Dad who heard the news first.

“Kayla is very laid back, sort of like me, nothing fazes her,” says Joe. “But when she got the news and she actually called and it was like, ‘Hey, I made it’…

“It’s special because I know how badly she wanted it. It’s always been on her to-do lists, one of her goals she wanted to achieve and it was one that was constantly escaping her.”

Both Dads are bursting with pride at how far their daughters have taken their chosen sport, and sharing it with an old friend and rival makes it a that much better.

“It’s fantastic,” said Joe. “Sam’s a quality guy and I’m super happy for his daughter and I’m super happy for Kayla. It would be great if they could go over there and do something, which I think they can, by the way.”

Why not? Let the legends grow.

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