By Amy Tennery
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Five-time Olympic basketball champion Sue Bird said she would draw on experience to help the U.S. women’s national team maintain their dominance amid growing talent worldwide, as she becomes their first-ever managing director.
The most decorated FIBA athlete ever with four World Cup golds to match her Olympic haul, Bird will step into a newly created role that comes with sweeping authority to help select coaches and players for the national team.
“I’ve had to be on a variety of USA basketball teams whether we were trying to win a gold medal at the Olympics or at a World Cup or just get together to get some practices in to have an exhibition game,” Bird told reporters on Thursday at Nike’s New York headquarters.
“Part of my role as point guard, as a leader, was to make it work and so I’m really going to lean on that understanding.”
She steps into the job at a critical moment for the long-dominant team that claimed a historic eighth consecutive Olympic crown in Paris by beating France 67-66 in the final, a nail-biting contest to which few U.S. fans were accustomed.
Bird, who won four WNBA titles and was named an All-Star a record 13 times in her 19 seasons with the Seattle Storm, said she had a front-row seat to the growth of the international game in her Olympic career that spanned from 2004 to the Tokyo Games in 2021.
“We have amazing talent, amazing players,” she said. “Yes, the gold medal game was close, yes we were all sweating a little bit – that’s not new.”
Three of the top 10 picks in last month’s WNBA Draft came from outside the U.S. collegiate system – second pick Dominique Malonga of France, fifth selection Juste Jocyte of Lithuania and Slovenian Ajsa Sivka – a sign of the growing global influence on the top-flight North American league.
“It’s great for the game. Iron sharpens iron – it’s the only way to do it,” said Bird. “It speaks to the world changing in so many ways.”
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in New YorkEditing by Toby Davis)
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