LI Lutheran alum Syla Swords brings Olympic vision to life with Canada

For as long as Syla Swords can remember, one of her biggest life goals was to follow in the footsteps of her father and become an Olympian for Team Canada. She put together a vision board when she was in elementary school to help visualize those goals. But even she couldn’t have imagined how quickly that dream would become a reality.

Swords, who has lived the majority of her life in Sudbury, Ontario, became the youngest basketball player to make a Canadian Olympic team in the nation’s history at 18 years old. Before making the final 12-player roster on July 2, Swords starred at Long Island Lutheran. Her sister, Savvy, is set to enter her junior year at LuHi this year.

Swords’ father, Shawn, played for Canada's men's basketball team in the 2000 Olympics.

“My father has really inspired me to play for Team Canada,” Swords said. “The pride he showed and even now just talking about wearing the maple leaf on his jersey and hearing that national anthem play before games, he’s established that in me and my sister. So to get the chance to put on the Canada jersey is really special and now being able to say I’m the daughter of an Olympian and now an Olympian myself, it’s really cool.”

“She had this dream for a while,” Shawn said. “She had a vision board and she wrote on it that she wanted to play in the Olympics, so we always had it in the back of our minds that that was a big thing for her. And for her to be able to do it at 18 years old is really the biggest surprise. It’s kind of unbelievable that she’s already had one of her biggest dreams and goals already done, so she’ll have to get a new vision board.”

Swords, a 6-0 guard, was a two-time Newsday All-Long Island selection at LuHi. She averaged 17.6 points, 7.5 rebounds and 5.1 assists per game as a senior for a team that played one of the toughest schedules in the country, finishing with a 21-2 record. She was a McDonald’s High School All-American, and will play at the University of Michigan for coach Kim Barnes Arico, who grew up on Long Island.

“Playing at LuHi has been so crucial to me making the Olympic team at such a young age,” Swords said. “Just the coaching staff was so supportive of me going to play Canada basketball when in previous years they hadn’t allowed players to play on outside teams during the season, so coach Christina [Raiti] has been great with allowing me to play for a team I love, a country I love.”

Swords first represented Canada at the 2022 FIBA U17 World Cup. One year later, she played for Canada’s U19 team and made her debut with the senior national team later that year. Swords played for the national team during the Olympic qualifying round in February, which caused her to miss roughly two weeks of school and the high school basketball season.

Raiti said she’d been rigid in the past about not allowing players to play outside basketball during the varsity season. But she couldn’t deny Swords the chance to play for her home country and qualify for the Olympics.

“This was one of her dreams,” Raiti said. “We’re talking she blew out her birthday candles and this is what she wanted.”

The Swords family moved to Long Island before the start of her junior season after her father was hired as an assistant coach for the Long Island Nets, the G-League affiliate of the Brooklyn Nets. Shawn was on the coaching staff for Brooklyn’s summer league team in 2022 before getting an assistant coaching job for the Long Island Nets in August. Over that summer, the family started looking into schooling options for Syla and Savvy in the event they’d be on Long Island permanently and they found LuHi.

It didn’t take long for everyone at LuHi to realize the Brooklyn Nets’ hire meant finding gold for the Crusaders.

“You can sense she has a purpose for whatever she’s doing,” said John Buck, the LuHi Head of School and boys basketball coach. “Some kids you’ll see they are kind of just chilling, hanging around but Syla has a focus and purpose seemingly for every minute of the day.”

Bridget Carleton, a forward for the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, will be playing in her second Olympics for Canada. She played during the Olympic qualifying round with Swords.

“She’s only 18 and I forget about that all the time,” Carleton said. “She was only 17 at one of our training camps and she couldn’t go to the grocery store by herself so I would go with her.”

Carleton credited Swords’ maturity, basketball IQ, shooting and defending. She expects Swords to be a key part of Canada’s Olympic run.

“I’m really excited for her,” Carleton said. “She’s going to help us at Paris a lot.”

Swords said she’s just looking to help the team in any way she’s asked at the Olympics. Canada will play in Group B, which includes France, Australia and Nigeria. Canada's first game is on July 29 against France. This is the fourth straight Olympic games for Canada's women’s basketball team. Canada finished ninth in 2020 and hasn’t finished better than seventh (1984).

“I know I bring a lot of defensive energy,” Swords said. “I’m good at pressuring the ball, I’m good at giving ball handlers a tough time so as much as I can be disruptive on the court, that’s really my goal.

After watching Savvy lead Canada to the silver medal in the FIBA U17 World Cup in Mexico on Sunday, the entire Swords family is heading to Paris. Savvy averaged 16 points and six rebounds for Canada in what’s been a hectic summer for the Swords family.

“It’s going to be awesome,” Shawn said. “I just remember myself playing in the Olympics and it was such a great feeling and it’s just different from any other environment. You are playing for a whole country, you’re not just playing for one team and you have your flag with the maple leaf on your chest, it just brings back so much pride for me. So to be able to watch Syla do it is going to be awesome and to be there with my family, I’m looking forward to it and it’s going to be a great summer.”