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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.’”