Saskatchewan prep school providing one of few elite women's basketball programs despite obstacles

Athol Murray College of Notre Dame is no stranger to preparing athletes for the next level.

The school, located in the small Saskatchewan town of Wilcox, is home to a storied hockey program that has produced athletes such as Wendel Clark, Rob Brind'Amour, and Curtis Joseph.

Now, its part of another elite group as one of the few schools with a prep basketball program west of Ontario, one of only three women's programs.

This year, the Hounds are competing in North Pole Hoops' first season of the Women National Preparatory Association (WNPA), a nationwide league meant to showcase athletes that want to compete at the collegiate level, whether that's at home or abroad. By the end of the season the Hounds, alongside programs from Alberta, will have criss-crossed the continent. The end goal for most of the athletes? A shot at a scholarship worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Succeeding in that mission, however, is easier said than done.

While a number of students at Notre Dame and similar programs have moved on to top Canadian and American universities, the challenges of cost, a lack of governance, recruitment, and scheduling mean that prairie prep basketball programs are continually having to adjust and evolve.

Prep and post-grad basketball programs have been a longtime fixture on the American basketball landscape, but their existence is newer in Canada. The vast majority of the country's prep teams tend to be centred in Ontario.

Marc Ffrench, the team's coach, said the program's approach to garnering attention from big-name U.S. collegiate programs and top U Sports teams is a long-term commitment.

"If people think it's kind of a flash in the pan thing, it really isn't. I know that Notre Dame and myself, we're committed to this, and we're committed to being a really great spot. To start out with, with female sport and then growing our entire basketball experience here."

Ffrench said that, in comparison to the rest of Canada, the prairie prep basketball scene is akin to a small child. 

"Saskatchewan and the prairies is kind of unique still. It is probably the last bastion of high school basketball being thought of as the top level of the age group. The state of it is, well, it's small, it's still an infant."

This isn't the first time Notre Dame has been the home of a similar basketball team. Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the school offered a program on the men's side. The coach of that team, former University of Regina Cougar Adam Huffman is now the director at Calgary's CTA West. He said that the Notre Dame program was started to give Saskatchewan players who wanted to compete at the collegiate level a boost. 

"We just knew that the high school level was not preparing kids to be able to play in university because of the lack of an age restriction in our Canadian universities and colleges, these guys are all really old, and our kids out of high school, they're not ready to jump into the man's game," Huffman said.

Those efforts bore fruit, as multiple athletes from the program went on to play at the Division I level — a rarity for Saskatchewan basketball talent. However, there are obstacles for prep and post-grad programs to flourish.