The Milgrove, Ont. native is in the middle of preparing the SWNT for the Paralympics
For Michèle Sung, the passion for basketball started in the driveway of her family home in Milgrove, Ont., where she spent hours playing with her two brothers.
After getting cut from her club team multiple times, Sung broke through and made the roster, and the game has been part of her life ever since.
“I just stuck with it. I love the game, so it just found me,” said Sung.
She attended St. Mary High School, where her game opened doors to opportunities in both NCAA and USports.
“My parents were huge on the education piece; they wanted me to go somewhere where I could keep as many doors open as possible,” Sung explained.
“The University of Manitoba was appealing; I could step into a good team early, be a starter, and contribute. I also really wanted to play because I love the game. I didn’t want to go somewhere where I was going to sit for three years.”
Sung spent five years playing for the Bisons while completing her Bachelor of Kinesiology degree.
While at the University of Manitoba, she was named an Academic All-Canadian as a freshman in 2006-07 and was the team captain for three consecutive seasons, beginning in 2007-08.
Following the 2009-10 season, she received the Sylvia Sweeney Award, which is presented to a player who demonstrates outstanding achievement in basketball, academics, and community involvement.
“I did a Bachelor of Kinesiology quickly because it mirrors sports so well,” said Sung. “I never had it as a plan to be a professional coach. There wasn’t many at the time. Still, in Canada, it’s not sold as a considerable profession just because they don’t have many financial opportunities if you want to sustain a family.”
After playing at the University of Manitoba, Sung decided to play professionally, spending just under two years in Serbia with the ZKK Partizan Basketball Club in Belgrade.
Sung returned to the University of Manitoba to work on her engineering degree.
“I had some very tough, high school teachers that convinced me – I really wanted to do engineering – they were all like, ‘Oh, you’re not good enough at math and physics.’ For whatever reason, university just clicked for me,” said Sung. “Maybe just the way that it’s delivered a little bit differently. I jumped over to engineering, and then the coaching bug got me kind of in that last year, and I never finished it.”
One of Sung’s first coaching opportunities came with the U17 female provincial team, where she was an apprentice coach for two years. Sung was also part of the 2013 Canada Games team that won bronze.
“The cool thing about coaching is that you’re always working on something, you’re always learning something new,” said Sung. “I think that spoke to what I enjoy about working. If I went back and did engineering – I think the work is interesting, but it can get monotonous.”
While working on her Biomedical Engineering degree, Sung met Bill Johnson and members of the Senior Women’s National Team.
Sung was an assistant coach with the University of Manitoba and working out with some of her university athletes when members of the wheelchair basketball team approached.
“A couple of the wheelchair athletes came over, and they were like, ‘Hey, can we do the workout with you?’ and I was like, ‘Sure, yeah, no problem,’” Sung recalled. “From there, they were like, ‘This is sweet, can we come back tomorrow?’
“Eventually, Bill was like, ‘Do you want to see what it’s all about?’ Bill, the smart man that he is, slowly pulled me in. Obviously, it was easy at the time because they were training in Winnipeg.”
Johnson eventually successfully recruited Sung to join the SWNT as an assistant coach from 2012-14, during which time she helped Canada win a gold medal at the 2014 Women’s World Championship in Toronto.
“This is Bill’s brain a bit: I didn’t have that predetermined, ‘Well, this is wheelchair basketball’,” Sung explained. “He wanted that perspective of just basketball, and then he would make it fit for the wheelchair basketball game. He’d say, ‘This is why actually, that’s a great idea or like, this is why it won’t work’.”
Following the stint with WBC, the 36-year-old returned to the University of Manitoba to take over as head coach of the women’s team. Sung helped the Bisons snap a 10-year playoff drought in 2020 and led the team to a first-round playoff victory in 2022.
Now coaching both stand-up and wheelchair basketball, Sung is seeing a lot of tactical pieces that apply to both games.
“There’s a lot of really cool transfer. One thing I realized coming back into wheelchair basketball is that stand-up is in a progressive, science-based coaching era,” she said. “I think there’s some real opportunities to ask the right people how we can apply it to wheelchair basketball and adaptive sport.
“I don’t think there’s as many barriers as maybe there’s been built up to be. I think we can change the way we coach the game a bit. I think we can get a bit more dynamic. I think we can make the game a bit more fun, but it’s going to take some time.”