The Senior Women's National Team is coming off a great start to the summer having won the Gold Medal at the Pan Am Games in Toronto. The next step for them is to qualify for the 2016 Olympics Games in Rio de Janeiro by winning the FIBA Americas Tournament taking place in Edmonton. Leading up to the Americas Tournament we spoke to our SWNT members and they gave us their thoughts on a few things and here's what they had to say. To buy tickets for the 2015 FIBA Americas Championship for Women, click here.

Coach Thomaidis on the depth of talent in the Senior Women's Program

We certainly have a really deep talent pool for our Senior Women's Program. It's great to be in this position. It certainly makes for some tough cuts and tough decisions but they should be tough since it's an international team. It's great we're at a point that it's very, very difficult to make the team. You have the best in the country, the best twelve playing a role, and these twelve also happen to be the best players.  It's amazing that they are the most cohesive unit.

Until we're winning Gold Medals at the Olympics I wouldn't call this an embarrassment of riches yet. This is certainly the deepest and most talented pool that we've had but there's still work to be done. And we still need to improve on that because we need to be in the conversation when you're talking about Olympics medals.

We could probably start any different combination on the floor and really not lose much at all. That's what people were talking about at the Pan Am Games is that we have our starters and we have our bench and there's really no dip in the level of talent. The parity and quality of talent is tremendous. We really pride ourselves on that.

We have our next best group of athletes playing on our Development Team, which is fantastic. The step between our Senior Team and our Development Team is getting smaller and that's what you need. You constantly need to have competition for our "A" team and you want players pushing from below to try and make that team. We're getting to a really good space where it's healthy competition and it's going to ensure the long-term success of this program.

From when I first started with the National Program, there's no comparison because the level of support is nowhere near where it is now. The support systems weren't in place, the human resources; everything that's changed in the last few years wasn't there then.  As much as we had fantastic athletes and an incredible coaching staff we just didn't have the depth of talent or the resources to work with these players over a numbers of years to get to where we are now. It was a very different landscape than it is now.

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