Handy time for Chantelle to step up ahead of EuroBasket

With Julie Page retired and Temi Fagbenle absent due to injury, Great Britain head coach Damian Jennings didn’t have to look far for someone willing to take on a bigger role in the frontcourt this summer.

One of the candidates was already on the team.

Following an impressive season with Turkish side Mersin, where she averaged 13.6 points and 5.6 rebounds in a highly-competitive league, Chantelle Handy has followed that up with some impressive performances for the national team as Great Britain warmed up for EuroBasket.

Handy has been around the GB team since 2007 and played a part in their only EuroBasket win to date, which came against Israel in 2011. The County Durham native has been impressing at a club level in Europe the last few seasons and wants to do whatever it takes in order for Great Britain to be successful.

With a squad that’s a little younger and less-experienced than the one that went to the Olympics, Handy is willing to step up and be a leader if that’s what her coach wants.

“I think I naturally take on that role anyway, but this year I’ll need to be,” said Handy, who will celebrate her 26th birthday during the tournament. “I can see myself being more of a leader on the team if that’s what they want me to be.”

Handy is a player who can contribute at both ends of the floor and not only knows where her strengths lie, but also where there is room for improvement.

“I definitely class myself as a shooter,” she said. “I should probably be more of a driver, but these days I tend to be more of a shooter.

“Defensively, I like to think that’s a strong point of mine. I’ve definitely got better over the years but I still have a lot of work to do in that area.”

Great Britain’s recent tournament in Sweden showed what Handy is capable of as she notched 22 points in a defeat to Sweden. She followed that up with 18 points in a defeat to Latvia in which Handy scored a go-ahead basket with 22 seconds remaining, only for Latvia to snatch a dramatic win at the buzzer.

Despite two impressive performances on back-to-back nights, Handy was only concerned with the fact that GB had lost.

“At the end of the day a win is a win and loss is a loss,” she said. “Doesn’t matter who scored what, at the end of the day we lost and we’ve got a lot of things to work on [before EuroBasket].”

One of the reasons why Handy believes Great Britain can be successful is down to their new head coach, Damian Jennings. Having worked as an assistant under previous coaches Mark Clark and Tom Maher, Jennings was the obvious choice to take over this summer and Handy was delighted he got the role.

“I had him as the head coach when we went to China for the Student Games and I was very impressed at the time,” said Handy. “Half the reason I came back was because Damian got the head coach job.”

Jennings faces a tough baptism in his first tournament as head coach with Serbia, Latvia and the hosts France taking on Great Britain for a place in the second round.

The Serbians are a bit of an unknown quantity and perhaps Great Britain’s best chance of a win will be against Latvia, after the two teams fought a great battle in the recent Sweden tournament.

The final game against France, who so cruelly denied GB a historic win at last year’s Olympics, is one game Handy knows her fellow former Olympians will be looking forward to, but only after the other games are out of the way.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of emotion, especially for the girls that were on the Olympic team for that game.

“We’re just going to take each game as it comes, so one game at a time and not think about the next game until we finish the first one. We’re not looking too far ahead.”

GB Women’s Schedule (All times BST):

Sat 15 Jun Serbia v GREAT BRITAIN (11.30am)

Sun 16 Jun GREAT BRITAIN v Latvia (2pm)

Mon 17 Jun France v GREAT BRITAIN (8pm)

Niall Gray is an experienced sports journalist, specialising in basketball and ice hockey, and runs the Hoops and Hockey pages on Facebook and Twitter