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Canada Basketball

Canada Defeats England For First Commonwealth Games Victory

TOWNSVILLE, AUSTRALIA (April 6, 2018) - Canada's women's Commonwealth Games team earned a historic 80-54 victory over England on Friday evening in their opening game of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games.

The win was Canada's first in basketball at the Commonwealth Games.  Basketball has only been on the Commonwealth Games program once, at Melbourne 2006 (Canada did not enter teams in the tournament).

Daneesha Provo and Shay Colley led Canada with a game-high 14 points each. Alex Kiss-Rusk chipped in 10 points of her own, while Ruth Hamblin and Ceejay Nofuente had nine points each.

Tied 15-15 after the first quarter, Canada closed the half strong and carried a 41-32 lead into the break.  As part of a 9-0 run that stretched into the second half, Canada increased their lead to 48-32 as they began to pull away in the third quarter.  The Canadian lead grew to as many as 29 points as they cruised to the 80-54 victory.

Friday's win was also the first for Steve Baur as head coach of a Canadian national team.

Canada is in Pool A along with Australia, England and Mozambique.

Click here for the box score.

QUOTES

"I think the team and probably myself shared some of the same things. We started off a little tight but as we got into the flow and loosened up a little bit things got cleaner.  We'll finish this now and be able to assess the things we were doing well, which is something to build on, and there is a couple things we need to tidy up before we see Australia." - Steve Baur, Head Coach

"You could tell it was our first game as it was a bit shaky in the first half.  We were getting good looks but we couldn't quite finish them.  I thought that we played together and played really well and just kind of trusted the principles that we've been working on the past few weeks." - Ruth Hamblin

UP NEXT

Canada continues preliminary round pool play on Sunday, April 8 against Australia at 18:30 (4:30 AM ET). The game will be streamed on DAZN. Click here for the complete tournament schedule.

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For more information, contact:

Matt Walker, mwalker@basketball.ca