Momentum: 3×3 basketball player Paige Crozon sheds light on elite sport and motherhood

When 3×3 basketball player Paige Crozon makes her Olympic debut at Paris 2024, it will be all the sweeter for the challenges she faced along the way.

Looking at the tournament records for Crozon’s team, which includes twin sisters Michelle and Katherine Plouffe, as well as Kacie Bosch, you see a team that has absolutely crushed it on the international circuit. They are back-to-back FIBA 3×3 Women’s Series Champions in 2022 and 2023. They were the 2022 3×3 AmeriCup champions, silver medallists at the 2022 FIBA 3×3 World Cup, and bronze medallists at the 2023 AmeriCup. It’s a lot of hardware for a team that only started playing together in 2019.

But prior to joining Canada’s women’s 3×3 national team, Crozon played basketball professionally overseas. In 2018, she gave birth to her daughter, Poppy, and suddenly, some teams were less keen on her as an athlete.

“I tried to come back and play five-on-five and was in contact with a few clubs in Europe. I wanted to go back. At the time, there weren’t as many women that were playing professional sports with children, or at least in basketball. And if they were, they were a little higher profile than I was at the time. So I had numerous clubs say to me– ‘We can’t have a woman and a child. We’ve never accommodated a family. We don’t know how to have someone that has a child with them’,” Crozon said on a recent episode of Momentum, a podcast by Team Canada.

Crozon found not only athletic success, but also acceptance of her dual roles as athlete and single mom amongst the newly formed Canadian women’s 3×3 team. Throughout their first summer in 2019, the players funded their own tournament travel, and Crozon’s infant daughter joined them in Europe as they competed to establish themselves as a team.

“Our first year together, my daughter was eight months old at the time, and I was going into the gym and I had my gym bag, my diaper bag, and the stroller. And of course, Poppy didn’t want to ride in the stroller. So she was in my arms and my teammates were just like: ‘let us help you.’ One of them was taking the diaper bag. One of them was carrying Poppy, the other one was pushing the stroller. The way that those women showed up for me in that moment–I was seen. I was safe as a woman with a child in sport and that was so powerful for me at that time.”

Poppy, now five, has quite literally grown up being a part of the team, witnessing her mom and her teammates support and push one another every day. But it wasn’t just Crozon’s teammates who were vital to helping her navigate the combination of elite sport and motherhood. The non-profit Crozon works for–Living Skies Indigenous Basketball League–also played an important role.

“When I was applying for jobs in sport as a single parent, I was approaching organizations–which were predominantly male-dominated–and telling them, ‘I want to be involved in your organization. I play for Team Canada, I have this experience, however, I have a child…’ I was almost approaching it from a deficit perspective. It wasn’t until I started working with Living Skies and had amazing mentors and Indigenous leaders supporting me that they said: ‘Paige–that is actually a strength. We see you, we value you, and we actually think it makes you a better employee. It makes you better able to support the youth we work with.’ Since then, I’ve felt so empowered in my roles and just being able to tell my own story.”

To listen to Paige Crozon’s full episode, check out Momentum wherever you get your podcasts.