For Isabelle Harrison, being part of a Sandy Brondello practice is nothing new. However, the city they are in is new for both of them. In the first week of Toronto Tempo training camp, the fact that Brondello coached Harrison with the New York Liberty last year and also drafted her for the Phoenix Mercury brings a sense of familiarity and leadership to Toronto as the Tempo's inaugural season draws closer.
Harrison acknowledges the advantage of this familiarity. 'I'm familiar with her. She's familiar with me. She knows I work hard, I play hard, I show up here to play,' Harrison said of Brondello. She is using that familiarity to help her teammates become acclimated to Brondello's system, which the former player and longtime WNBA coach brings to one of the league's two new franchises.
'I feel good. I love going into a situation where I know what to expect, so I'm able to not only just play my game, but also help my teammates and talk to them and get them in the spots that I know that they need to be in. Just being an extra voice and extension to Sandy and Olaf (Lange, an assistant coach), I think that's my biggest role right now,' Harrison added.
Other Team Leaders on the Tempo
When Harrison signed with the Tempo on April 12, she joined other veterans like Brittany Sykes, who bring leadership experience ahead of the team's first-ever game on May 8. Two days after signing Sykes, Toronto signed Temi Fágbénlé, who brings a particularly unique experience: she played for the Golden State Valkyries last year in their expansion season and has taken the lessons learned to Toronto.
'Everything is a first. Every move made is history-making. And you can tend to be overwhelmed a little bit about that, whether that's the energy from outside, energy from inside, you know, everyone's got a new job,' Fágbénlé said. 'So everyone wants to do the best that they can and just give it their all. So it's important to stay grounded, but also to stay in the moment and just enjoy it all—but without getting too crazy.'
Sykes, meanwhile, joins Marina Mabrey and Hamilton-born Kia Nurse as the leadership group, those who lead by example and let their WNBA experience serve as its own statement of dedication. But she is also aware of the opportunity a blank slate presents.
'We're literally creating our own foundation. We're creating our own standard, our own everything,' Sykes said. 'Obviously, the Valkyries, they did an amazing job with expansion. Now it's us and Portland that are up on the task of continuing the success.'
That piece of creating their own foundation presents its own challenges. 'It's all new for us, whereas in a free agency or if you go to a team, you have players who have already been there, established. They got a routine, literally, from top to bottom,' Sykes said. 'We're all trying to figure out what the day to day looks like. I can't even tell you that yesterday was the same as today, because it's not, but that's the beauty of it, you know? It's from scratch. We get to literally lay out the foundation. We can knock out all the bad things, and we can really build something really special in this first year. Just because it's our first year doesn't mean that we have to live by it. We can still play as if we weren't a first-year team.'
