WNBA gamers Natalie Achonwa, Bridget Carleton and Kia Nurse headline Canada’s ladies’s basketball roster for World Cup coaching

WNBA gamers Natalie Achonwa, Bridget Carleton and Kia Nurse headline Canada’s ladies’s basketball roster for its pre-World Cup coaching camp.

Nurse, a guard for the Phoenix Mercury, hasn’t performed since struggling a torn anterior cruciate ligament throughout the WNBA playoffs final October.

Achonwa and Carleton had been obtainable instantly for the Canada camp since their Minnesota Lynx didn’t qualify for the present WBNA playoffs.

Head coach Victor Lapena chosen 15 gamers for camp, which opened Wednesday and runs by Sept. 8. It’s the primary time because the COVID-19 pandemic the Canadian ladies have gathered in Edmonton, which has been their base since 2013.

Following camp, the Canadians will journey to Sydney, Australia for a sequence of exhibition video games Sept. 10-18.

Canada is in a tricky Group B for the World Cup. They’ll open in opposition to Serbia on Sept. 22 native time (or Sept. 21, 11 p.m. ET). They’ll then play France, Japan and host Australia earlier than closing the group part in opposition to Mali.

The highest 4 groups in every group will advance to the quarter-finals with the winners shifting on to the semi-finals and medal spherical.

Canada went 1-1 on the qualifying match in Osaka in February to clinch a berth.

The nineteenth FIBA ladies’s World Cup options the world’s 12 nationwide groups, with 38 video games performed throughout 10 days in Sydney, Australia.

The Canadian crew, which was ousted within the preliminary spherical of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, is fourth within the FIBA world ladies’s rating.