Kia Nurse will always remember the first WNBA game she played in Canada.
Her team at the time, the Los Angeles Sparks, met the Seattle Storm in Edmonton for a 2024 preseason contest.
After helping the Sparks to a win, she took the long way to the locker room, wanting as much time as possible to take it in. She passed a row with each jersey she’d worn in her career laid out: New York, Phoenix, Canada, L.A. and Seattle, among others. She remembered each as a symbol of what she’d accomplished — but also of what she’d sacrificed to get there — and tried to absorb the fact that “there” now meant Canada also.
“I cried quite a bit going into that, and it was all happy tears,” Nurse said after reflecting on that game at Toronto Tempo training camp on Thursday.
“That moment was like a full-circle moment. A piece of me believes that the WNBA wouldn’t really exist in Canada if I hadn’t gone through all the stuff that’d I’d gone through.”
Now, just 15 days before the 2026 season begins, Nurse is on the Tempo practice court at the University of Toronto, preparing for not just one game at home, but an entire franchise in Canada.
Ahead of the Tempo’s first game on May 8, Sportsnet chatted with Nurse about preparations for the inaugural season and the impact of a team in Canada.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sportsnet: What was your reaction when you heard the news that a team was coming to Toronto?
Kia Nurse: My gut told me that it was a good idea to come and be a part of this. I think just in terms of legacy, this is going to be really exciting. I think it’s 10 or 15 years down the road when we look back and see the changes in grassroots programs, the changes in participation for young women in basketball in Canada.
I think 15 years down the road, we’ll be able to look back and say, similar to how we have all these kids in the NBA and WNBA now, we were Vince Carter era kids, these will be Tempo era, kids.
Was it always the plan to sign with Toronto?
No, not at all, honestly. I go into every free agency just thinking we’ll take all the meetings that come our way, and then we’ll make a decision from there. The last couple of years, because we were sitting and waiting with uncertainty in the CBA negotiations, and I had moved to a couple of different teams based on free agency and trades, there wasn’t a lot of consistency, but I knew that my life was consistent here at home.
To come here, I knew that there was going to be a lot of new and a lot of inconsistency in terms of this organization starting and coming to a new team, but the consistency would be absolutely everything else, because my life is here.
What role do you see yourself playing this season?
Just continuing to bring veteran leadership and poise with whatever minutes I get. It’s just being out there and being a difference maker, being an X-factor on both ends of the floor, bringing the energy and communicating with everybody in any way that I can.
Throughout your career, you’ve faced adversity, especially with your ACL injury in 2022. What have you learned about resiliency that you hope to bring to this team, knowing the difficulties an expansion team is bound to face?
Resiliency is going to be a part of every season that you go through. But you want to enjoy coming to work. You want to enjoy the people that you’re around in the locker room. And a lot of that’s going to be built off the court. I think for us, it’s going to be continuing to find things that we have in common. It might be asking someone to go out for a coffee or go out for dinner … the young ones are going to pay for my dinner now with the amount of money they make.
How will you approach mentoring the younger players on the team?
I try to just be chill. One of them told me I’m a cool vet today, so I’m like, yeah, that’s what I go for.
But just organic conversations and just making them feel like they can be themselves. I’m pretty quirky, so I don’t mind being that and being outgoing for them to be able to feel that there’s a space for them to be as open as they want to be.
One thing that you talked about at your end-of-the-year press conference with the Chicago Sky last season was the challenge of being on so many teams in so few seasons. But again, here you are on a new team. How do you face that challenge this year?
I think it’s different in the sense that we’re all brand new. This is a new team from scratch, so everybody’s in the same boat. We’ve got a lot of vets on our team that have been around different organizations through different seasons, different roles.
It’s very nice for me, like when we have an off day. I just go home, and I get out of the hustle and bustle of the city and away from basketball, so being able to settle like that is massive. I think you have to be able to have a really good balance, because it does get a lot.