Even after Mission’s Kim Smith-Gaucher played her last game as a professional basketball player, she had the pedigree to receive a contract offer.
When Smith-Gaucher refused the final offer to play overseas, it left her in tears.
“I knew when I said no that it was definitely over. So it was a really hard thing to call my agent and say a definitive no to this club,” she said.
Smith-Gaucher’s career spanned two decades and included three trips to the Olympics, gold medals at the Pan-Am Games and FIBA AmeriCup, provincial championships with Heritage Park Secondary, along with appearances in the NCAA’s Elite Eight and the WNBA Finals.
It’s been a little over a year since retirement and Gaucher still misses hitting the hardwood.
“It’s not easy to retire but I feel like when people in normal jobs retire, they tell you that it’s a tough transition,” she said. “The highs and adrenaline rushes that you get in games — you just don’t get to experience anywhere else that I’ve found yet in life. It’s a loss that you go through.”
The three-time Olympian never officially announced her retirement.
“Well, I was going to retire like twice already in my career, so the third and final time, I just stopped playing,” she said.
Her final game was in 2022 in France. She says if it wasn’t for her body and feet, she would want to keep playing.
“I always knew that my body wasn’t going to hold up forever. I feel like I held on quite long,” she said.“I could deal with the temporary pain but as soon as I felt like I was doing more long-term damage [I knew] I had to take a step back.”
The possibility of waking up and struggling to walk wasn’t exciting to Gaucher. Twenty years from now, she still wants to be able to run with her daughter.
But retirement from basketball has been a struggle. Without a team or a job, Gaucher felt lost and didn’t know where to start.
“Even though you know it’s not your identity — that you’re more than a basketball player – it’s such a big piece of your life to give up. I was never somebody who had a clear path – I took all the career surveys, I was looking into stuff, but I was never somebody that knew exactly what I wanted to do,” she said.
Smith-Gaucher fell in love with the game after watching her older sister play. She wanted to copy her sibling and would follow her to all of her practices and games.
During timeouts and halftime, she would always seize the opportunity to get shots up on the court. Additionally, Smith-Gaucher would put in work in the driveway with her dad – who was her first coach.
Growing up in Mission, Smith-Gaucher was a member of incredible teams coached by Bruce Langford and Frank Chan.
“They’re so dedicated. I mean, I was able to get into the gym every single morning before school and they were they were there alongside me, which is pretty exceptional,” she said.
She attended Heritage Park Secondary in Mission where she was a part of three consecutive provincial championship runs and a Reebok National Championship in 2001.
Smith-Gaucher says it was her ability to outwork and outthink other players that allowed her to succeed on the court. However, it wasn’t until she was invited to national team tryouts heading into her Grade 12 year that she realized she could take her game to the next level.
“I made it my goal to be the hardest working one in the gym. Whether that was being the first one to practice and being the last one to leave, I wanted to soak up everything in that environment,” she said.
At the end of training camp, she went to Brazil with the team.
“Looking back now, I wasn’t one of the best 12 players in the country by any means,” Smith-Gaucher said. “But they looked at it as we’re building growing, and we see you as somebody that could be a piece of the future. And that exposure to the highest level is so invaluable to young athletes.”
Smith-Gaucher marvels at how much has changed since her first few years on the national team.
Her tenure with the maple leaf on her chest spanned over 20 years. Over that time, she endured highs and lows with the program.
“It was definitely a grind. There were some long summers we didn’t have a whole lot to play for – just continuing to practice, build and kind of getting smacked by good teams,” she said.
Throughout the early 2000s, Team Canada built continuity by having the same people invest. They spent most of their summers together while playing overseas during the winter.
They all made the commitment to get the squad back to the Olympics for the first time since 2000. However, they missed out on Athens in 2004 and Beijing in 2008.
“It’s pretty devastating and it’s one of those things that’s really hard to explain or describe,” Smith-Gaucher said. “You only get a chance every four years. They’re the lows that are so hard in sport because it’s the lowest of lows. With the Olympics, everybody’s talking about them and everybody is watching but you just don’t want anything to do with it because it hurts so bad.”
Ahead of the London 2012 Olympics, the Canadians were in jeopardy of missing their third consecutive games.
At the last chance qualifying tournament in Turkey, Canada punched their ticket to the British capital with a 71-63 win over Japan on Canada Day. Smith-Gaucher says it’s the highlight of her career.
“It was one of the coolest, proudest moments I’ve had – to be able to celebrate that final game alongside that group that had committed so much and just to feel like this giant weight lifted off your shoulders,” she said. “That final game almost seems like more of a highlight than playing in the Olympics because of what it meant to finally get back.”
She was Canada’s leading scorer at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London and helped the squad to the quarterfinals. She also played for Canada in the 2016 Rio Games and in Tokyo 2020.
Getting to Tokyo was a challenge in itself for Smith-Gaucher because of rules that prevented families from travelling to the competition due to COVID-19.
Prior to the games, she feared she would have to choose between skipping the games or going almost a month without her daughter — who she was still breastfeeding. After a plea on social media, Smith-Gaucher was joined by her daughter Sophie for the Olympics after the International Olympic Committee decided to allow breastfeeding moms to bring their children to Tokyo.
Outside of the national team, the Mission product stacked accomplishments as well.
Smith-Gaucher carved a legendary collegiate career with the University of Utah from 2002-06 where she was a four-time Mountain West Conference Player of the Year.
She set the program record for points with 2,281 and earned third-team All-America honours as a senior in 2006. Smith-Gaucher was named to an all-women Pac-12 Hall of Fame class earlier in 2023 and made the trip to Las Vegas for the tournament.
“It’s so funny with all this conference realignment, I never played in the Pac 12,” Smith-Gaucher said.
In her senior year, she led the squad to the Elite Eight where the Utes lost in overtime. Smith-Guacher says she loved her time in Utah, especially because they knew her biggest dreams were with the national team.
“They were always incredibly supportive of me spending my entire summers with the national team,” she said.
When she graduated from Utah, Smith-Gaucher expected to be drafted. With the 13th overall selection in the 2006 WNBA Draft, the defending champion Sacramento Monarchs selected the shooting guard out of Mission.
However, joining the Monarchs was a challenge. With an established team fresh off a championship run, Smith-Gaucher struggled to establish a consistent role.
“The biggest adjustment is that you just have to be so strong mentally because there’s gonna be games where you’re gonna play a bunch and then the next game, you’re not gonna play at all,” she said.
Smith-Gaucher says she wasn’t a great fit in Sacramento and craved the comfort of the national team. It left her torn on playing in the WNBA.
However, she says playing in the WNBA taught her valuable lessons on how to be a professional athlete.
She carried those lessons overseas while playing professionally in France, Belgium and Spain.
Smith-Gaucher says missing time around family was the biggest challenge of playing in Europe.
“You miss [a lot] — it’s a bit of the same thing with the national team in the summers,” she said. “The number of weddings that you miss [or] when my nephews were born — having to experience so much from afar is always really difficult.”
Despite the challenges, Smith-Gaucher and her family found a second home in France late in her career with USO Mondeville.She was going to retire after the Rio Olympics in 2016 but received an offer to keep playing with the team in France.
“Instead of retiring I signed another three-year contract with the club and just kind of stayed there until the Tokyo Olympics. I really only have fond memories [there],” she said.
In her final season in France, she was playing with a different club and saw the clock ticking on her playing career. She enjoyed her life off the court but basketball was a different story.
“It was just a grind. It was just one of those typical years overseas where there’s losing, there’s all kinds of off-court issues,” she said. “On the court, I just found that I didn’t want to put in the same amount of work and that my body was just a little bit more tired.”
Over a year after playing her final game in France, Smith-Gaucher looks back on her playing career fondly.
During her decades of hooping, Smith-Gaucher’s teams fell just short of championships in the NCAA and WNBA, while Canada didn’t medal at the three Olympics.
“It’s always really tough to handle and find any kind of perspective in the moment,” she said. “As time goes on, the losses [and] the initial hurts start to fade. And you can look back and be like ‘Wow, well that’s pretty cool’.”
The hunt for an Olympic medal could continue for Smith-Gaucher. After a stint away from the sport post-retirement, she returned to Team Canada – this time as a coach.
She was named head coach of the 3x3 women’s national team earlier this year and hopes to stay involved with the game.
“I’ve always been a more analytical player. I’ve always enjoyed breaking down film and watching things. I feel like I can see things well on the court,” she said. “It’s definitely something that I’m interested in – it’s just a matter of what’s the right path?”
Despite the new gig, Smith-Gaucher says she still doesn’t have everything figured out.
“I tried to see if there was something [outside of basketball] but there was never something that I was like, ‘I’m definitely going to do this, I know exactly what I’m gonna roll into.’ I’m gonna give myself some grace and a little bit of time to try some things and figure it out,” she said.
READ MORE: Mission’s three-time Olympian Kim Gaucher bound for Pac-12 Hall of Honor
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dillon.white@missioncityrecord.com
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