I used to hate losing

Action shot of me at the 2026 CCAA National Championships at Dawson College with St. Thomas University Women’s Basketball. (Submitted by Claudia Steeves)

I used to hate losing. 

When I reached my senior year of high school at Holy Heart High, the biggest high school in St. John’s, Newfoundland, my basketball team, the Holy Heart Highlanders, was the team to beat, favoured to go all the way as the 4A Provincial Champions. 

I was playing with my best friends for the last time. All I wanted was a chance at the championship banner, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get there.  

We made it to the semifinal against the Waterford Valley Warriors, a team we had beaten all year. We were up the entire game, and then suddenly it was tied with 10 seconds remaining. 

They were able to get one last shot up just before the buzzer and missed, but a shooting foul was called against me. They missed their first free throw but made the second. They were now up by just one point. With 4 seconds left on the clock, we had a chance for the game-winning shot. 

The coach had drawn up a play: a layup under the basket from one of our sophomore players. But the ball inbounded to me in the left-hand corner instead. When the ball hit my palms, I knew this was going to be my last shot in my high school career. Everything went silent. 

I shot; the ball bounced on the rim twice, circled once, but then rimmed out, and we lost. 

My entire high school career, I wanted one thing. Every year, it was shining right in front of my eyes, so close I could almost touch it. This was how I went out, the crowd chanting MVP as I collapsed onto the wooden floor, knowing it would be the last time I stepped on the court with this team. 

I don’t hate losing now. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to win. What I’ve lost is the fear of losing. 

To understand what happened to me, I need to return to 2015. Back then, I was a curly brown-haired girl, about the height where you can just begin going on any roller coaster your heart desires, with some lankiness. 

I wore tomboy clothes head to toe and had four missing teeth right in the centre of my smile. I lived in a tall, four-story house where floorboards creaked, and paint chipped off the walls, a house filled with unconditional love. My neighbourhood was colourful, vibrant on sunny days, and quiet on foggy ones. 

The house stood at the top of a steep downtown hill, looking down at the harbour.

Kids constantly rode their bikes up and down the streets or sledged in the wintertime on the big backyard hills. I lived with both of my parents throughout my childhood, up until their divorce in my later teenage years, as well as my two older sisters, Kelsey and Ella, whom I admired. 

The house was, much of the time, a chaotic environment, smelling of the garden plants my mother raised or my father’s workbench, where he spent endless hours hidden away in the dark basement. 

On Sundays, you could typically hear traditional Newfoundland music blaring on the radio, or what I liked to call “Sunday music.” When I began attending grade school, Ella was two years older than me. I always seemed to fit in better when I was with her, and I became her shadow for the years to come, like a satellite orbiting her world. 

Wherever she went, I went. She began to play basketball for the school’s sixth-grade team, the Bishop Field, field mice. I was envious. My father coached the team, often treating it as seriously as an NCAA championship team. I attended every practice and every game, idolizing the players and wishing I could be in their position someday.  

Our gymnasium was small, in an old, rusted school nearly straight out of Harry Potter, with huge pillars, sky-high ceilings, and spiral stairs leading down into the court. I would sit above and observe, practicing my handling and teaching myself to dribble a ball. When I reached grade five, my sister graduated and moved to middle school. Though it was just up the street, I began navigating the world on my own. 

Growing up, I never truly knew what I wanted to become, or, quite frankly, what I wanted to do in life. I picked up a new hobby nearly every single week, whether it was teaching myself an instrument, counting how many pogo stick jumps I could do in a row, or roller skating. I never quit something until I perfected it. Then I would find a new hobby to explore, and the cycle repeated itself. But when I first picked up an orange ball in grade five and began to play, I knew this would be different from any of my other hobbies. At that age, basketball wasn’t about trophies or banners. It was about feeling like I had a place in a world I didn’t yet know how to navigate on my own.  

By the time I was in grade six, I was called up to play with the junior high team for the provincial tournament because they were short on players. Not expecting to get much playing time and content with just being there, it turned out I would play a very important role that weekend. In the end, I became their starting point guard, and I led us to the championship banner. My dreams, for the first time, didn’t seem so out of reach. At the time, I thought this was what basketball was supposed to feel like: that effort was always rewarded, and belief was enough. I didn’t know yet what it meant to lose something that mattered to me. 

When I started my grade nine year, I was playing for the same team, this time as a senior. I still loved the game, but then the Covid pandemic began, putting everything in doubt.  

When things first started to shut down, I was training with the Canada Games Pod for Team Newfoundland in hopes of making the final cut a year later. My club team was about to travel to New York for a tournament, and I felt like I was climbing the ladder, getting closer to achieving my dreams. When I got the news that our trip was cancelled and I couldn’t play basketball for the foreseeable future, I was devastated. 

Basketball was the one thing I had; it kept me sane. Stripped away from me in a matter of days, it felt like a piece of my soul was taken with it. All of a sudden, I went from being a “star” player to experiencing complete uncertainty. Without being able to train, compete, or set foot in a gym, I started to fall into a bad place in my life.

I was hanging out with kids I shouldn’t have been and getting into trouble all the time. This wasn’t me; this isn’t who I wanted to be, but there I was, shut away in my room with a dream that was slowly fading out of existence. Canada Games training continued online, where self-accountability became everything. I’m not sure where the dreams that little grade-four me once had gone, but suddenly I was getting cut from the training team, and I didn’t feel good enough to keep going. For the first time in my life, basketball didn’t bring me the sense of peace it always had. And if it wasn’t basketball, then it was nothing. 

When the sport stopped loving me back, I didn’t know who I was without it. Failure was no longer just losing games or getting cut; it was losing my own identity. During the remainder of the COVID years, I didn’t play much. The love for the game was lost somewhere within me, though I knew it was still there, just no longer on the surface. 

After making it through the rest of the school year and the summer during the pandemic, the following year, I entered high school and, to my surprise, made the varsity team. That was when I started getting my spark back, and I met girls on this team who would become my friends for life. The season wasn’t easy. I sprained my ankle toward the end of the year just as we were preparing for the biggest tournament of the season, 4A’s. We lost by five in the semifinals. I still hated losing then. The fire was burning uncontrollably. 

After a long recovery, I finally returned to the court the next year for my sophomore season. We had a good run, we were top three in the province, and things were looking promising heading into 4A’s. We lost by two in the semifinal to our rival team, the Gonzaga Vikings, and I broke my hand in the final five minutes of the game. I felt our entire season slip away in seconds. I stood helpless on the sideline, fighting tears, not only from the pain in my hand, but from the pain in my chest, knowing we were going to lose again. 

After my last year of high school and my senior year on the team, losing a 4A championship banner, it gradually started to happen. It wasn’t one thing. It was the accumulation of experience. The losses didn’t end my career; they reshaped it. 

I got recruited to play for St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, something I never thought was possible until it was. I enjoyed my last summer at home, training hard and spending time with friends and family before moving away for the first time, leaving everything I had ever known and loved, and stepping into a world full of opportunity. 

Adjusting to this level wasn’t easy. Going from the star player to a rookie meant finding my place on a brand-new team, with girls I’d never met, a coaching staff I didn’t know, and a life I had never experienced. It didn’t take long for me to find my grounding. There were ups and downs, conversations with coaches about self-confidence, and learning to allow myself to make mistakes. 

My tenacious approach to the game became something I learned to control throughout my rookie season as a Tommie. I am a player who prides herself on the defensive end, focused on controlling the controllables, but I’m also a player who can score offensively off the drive or beyond the arc. My speed and athleticism are something most opponents have a lot of trouble guarding. That year, we finished 10–8 in the regular season, won our first playoff game, and then faced our rival, MSVU, in the semifinal. We were up in the fourth quarter; we could see the banner within reach, when suddenly it was tied with less than a minute remaining. We lost by three points. 

But after that loss, I found myself not chasing a banner the same way I used to. In my second year with the Tommies, we were 17–1 in the regular season. I’d been close to a banner before, but never this close, never at this level. We had a shot at the ACAA championship.  

When I stepped out onto the court for the final game against MSVU, I looked around and felt a sense of trust, not the old fear that I was accustomed to. I trusted my teammates. I trusted myself. I trusted the failures, the losses, the heartbreak, the tears, the medals. I trusted all the joy basketball has brought me since I first stepped onto the wooden floor of my elementary school gym. I trusted all of these things that have shaped me into the player I once dreamed of becoming. This time, I was ready. The gym was loud. The bleachers were packed with people dressed in Tommies green and gold. 

From my very first touch of the ball, the intensity of the gym was amplified, but I remained calm. About a minute into the game, I opened the scoring by hitting a three-point shot from the right wing; the crowd went wild. Then I knew the game was going to be one to remember.