By Lori Ewing
May 6 (Reuters) – When Teresa Resch first spotted a Toronto Tempo jersey “in the wild” she stopped in her tracks.
“To see a random person wearing your jersey, that was pretty cool,” the team president said. “So I went up and said hello and introduced myself and took a picture, put her on my Instagram page.”
For Resch, it was a quiet but powerful sign that Canada’s first WNBA team had crossed from idea to reality — not in a boardroom or at a podium, but on the street, worn by someone who already felt connected to it.
On Friday, the Tempo tip off their inaugural season when they host the Washington Mystics at Coca-Cola Coliseum, the culmination of months of compressed preparation and years of belief that professional women’s basketball would finally have a permanent home north of the border.
“What am I feeling right now? What I’ll go with is extreme excitement,” Resch said in an interview with Reuters. “It’s truly a culmination of so many people’s work, (but) not just the people working on it now, but so many people who have laid the groundwork ahead of us.
“It’s going to be historic in so many ways, and there are a lot of people who never thought this day would come.”
That sense of scale has sharpened quickly.
In roughly a 20‑day span this spring, the Tempo named a new principal owner in former Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri, unveiled their court, announced plans for a performance centre, selected players in the expansion draft, went on sale with single-game tickets – selling out multiple games – and opened training camp.
“All of this is happening really quickly,” Resch said. “It’s pretty incredible.”
Behind the scenes, the work has been relentless from negotiating player housing, furnishing apartments and setting up banking systems and communications. Even sourcing a tarp large enough to cover a basketball court for the team’s public unveiling took days.
Despite the pace, symbolic moments have made the scale of the project feel real. The Tempo’s first-ever draft pick, UCLA’s Kiki Rice, was one. Another was the signing of Kia Nurse, a leader of Canada’s national team for more than a decade who never expected to play professionally at home.
“You know you’re building something bigger than the Tempo, bigger than Toronto, bigger than Canada, when players who have never stepped foot here want to come play for your team,” Resch said.
MORE THAN A CITY TEAM
From the outset, the franchise has framed itself as more than a city team. At the Tempo’s launch, owner Larry Tanenbaum made that explicit.
“The name may be Toronto Tempo, but this is Canada’s team,” he told those in attendance.
Resch believes the franchise has a rare opportunity to claim that identity immediately, something that took the Raptors years to grow into, partly because Canada also had the Vancouver Grizzlies before they relocated to Memphis for the 2001-02 season.
“It’s only happened over time (for the Raptors), and winning the championship in 2019 definitely solidified that,” Resch said.
“But for the Tempo, we have an incredible opportunity that we get to start as Canada’s team.”
The club has already held events in Vancouver and Montreal, and will play regular‑season games in both cities.
“Every decision we make, we’re keeping that (Canada) lens,” Resch said.
WOMEN’S HEALTH IN FOCUS
The ambition stretches beyond basketball.
Asked about the impact the Tempo could have on girls and women, Resch pointed to the Raptors’ transformative effect on the men’s game in Canada, now reflected in a national team filled with NBA players.
“That wasn’t the case 30 years ago,” she said. “If you can see it, you can be it.”
But Resch stressed that the team’s purpose goes further.
The club recently launched Tempo Impact, a social impact platform rooted in a sobering statistic: women in Canada live an average of 20% of their lives in poorer health than men.
Tempo Impact focuses on physical, mental and social health, working with partners including Canada Basketball, Canadian Women & Sport and Women’s College Hospital Foundation.
“There are only about 160 players in the WNBA in the entire world,” Resch said. “So not every Canadian girl is going to be a professional basketball player.
“But what we can do is make sure they’re active, that they find the benefits of sport and that they find community, through fandom and being associated with the Tempo.”
Resch resigned from her role as a longtime Raptors executive in March 2024 and was announced as president of Toronto’s WNBA expansion team less than three months later.
With opening night finally here, emotion sits close to the surface.
“How can you not be?” Resch said. “Especially the last month, every day, every hour, every minute.”
Years from now, when people look back on the start of the first WNBA team in Canada, she hopes the defining memory will not be records or results but something bigger than a basketball team.
“I hope they say they felt included,” she said. “What we’re trying to build is an ecosystem, an environment, a team, where everybody can feel like they belong in that circle.”
For Resch, that idea carries particular weight in a country known for its diversity and “specifically Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in the world.
“It’s about creating a space where you can show up as yourself and feel like you belong, where there’s a place for you in this. I hope people feel that way.”
(Reporting by Lori Ewing; Editing by Ken Ferris)
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