Junior Academy

Junior Academy Program (JRA) is a part of Canada Basketball’s Targeted Athlete Strategy (TAS) program which was started in 2009. One of the primary objectives of the TAS program is to guide the development of athletes in the youth age group category.

Junior Academy serves as the entry point into Canada Basketball's High Performance Athlete Development Pathway. Through excellent coaching and programming, our goal is to provide grade 7 and 8 students with an opportunity to train and develop in a high-performance environment.

Over the course of eight weekend training sessions, athletes will be centralized in a training camp away from their homes, where they can develop their on-court skills. Athletes will also be introduced to our off-court sessions which focus on social/emotional/mental development.

Athletes will work with targeted coaches that have had their success at respective levels and have shown their dedication with our national program.

Junior Academy is meant to continue to fill gaps in the athlete’s developmental pathway between the Learn-to-Train and Train-to-Train stages of the Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) model in order to guide players towards becoming “Global Players.” This process stresses the importance of athletes training to be successful on-the-court in addition to gaining the knowledge base necessary to be ambassadors for the game and the country.

The goal of the Canada Basketball Junior Academy Program is for athletes to not only comprehend and apply valuable skills, but also to synthesize these techniques and evaluate how the lessons-learned fit into authentic game-like situations.