As we learn more about the growth of Canadian basketball and the players emerging from different communities to have success, it has become clear how much representation matters. In order to make it, it helps to first see yourself in others who have gone where you are trying to go and paved a path for you to follow.
That has certainly been the case for the Prosper siblings.
Growing up in Rosemere, Que., a suburb of Montreal, Olivier-Maxence and Cassandre Prosper were very close. The siblings played a wide variety of sports, but basketball always had the advantage because their parents, father Gaetan and mother Guylaine, both played it at the collegiate level for Concordia University, while Guylaine also played briefly for Team Canada.
Now, Olivier-Maxence and Cassandre are both breaking out at the NCAA level, with 20-year-old Olivier-Maxence having a career year as a junior at Marquette University, and 17-year-old Cassandre enrolling early at Notre Dame after dominating high school and training with the Canadian senior women’s national team.
But the siblings might not have known which road to follow if not for those who did it before them. And, more importantly, if not for each other.
Olivier-Maxence is a six-foot-eight, 230-pound forward in his junior year at Marquette University, the 11th-ranked team in the NCAA. He is having a career year, averaging 13.6 points, 4.7 rebounds and 0.9 steals per game along with highly efficient 54/34/77 shooting splits, garnering attention ahead of the 2023 NBA Draft.
But for Olivier-Maxence, the older of the two siblings, the journey to NCAA success was a long and arduous one, taking him from his Brookwood Elite AAU team in Montreal to Lake Forest Academy prep school in Chicago to the NBA Academy Latin America in Mexico City, where he spent his senior year of high school alongside fellow Montreal-native Bennedict Mathurin, now a rookie for the Indiana Pacers.
“Obviously Lu Dort and what he did, he paved the way I would say a little bit,” Olivier-Maxence tells me about his role models, explaining how Dort left Montreal to go to prep school in the United States before fighting his way into the NBA as an undrafted player. “He did create a path for guys like Ben and me coming after him.”
Olivier-Maxence says going to the NBA Academy for his final year of high school was one of the best decisions he ever made, allowing him to get good college offers as a four-star recruit. “And yeah, also having somebody like Ben over there, that I already knew before, we could just [be] two guys from Montreal that played there in Mexico City that just challenged each other each and every day. That was a big factor to the decision for me to go there,” Olivier-Maxence said.
Thanks in large part to Dort and Mathurin, Olivier-Maxence had a path to follow out of Montreal toward his goal of one day playing in the NBA. After one year at the NBA Academy, he joined Clemson University for his freshman season before transferring to Marquette as a sophomore. He also played for Team Quebec at the youth level and for Team Canada at the Under-19 World Cup in 2021, helping them win bronze. It’s a goal of his to one day play for the senior national team and reach the Olympics.
Olivier-Maxence’s first year at Marquette was a bit of a learning curve, especially offensively, but the more he has developed his trust and relationships with the coaches and players, the more comfortable he has felt on the floor. Now, he is breaking out in his second season there, looking every bit of the versatile forward that NBA teams covet, defending multiple positions and impacting the game in a variety of ways offensively, shooting a career-high from three and working diligently to improve his balance and footwork on drives.
“It's a credit to the work I put in the off-season, living in a gym each and every day, and really working on my craft,” Olivier-Maxence said about his breakout season. “I'm never complacent about anything I do. So that mindset of always wanting more, to always stay on top of my work and being consistent with my work has led me to having the season I'm having.”
Olivier-Maxence has not yet decided if he is going to declare for the 2023 NBA Draft. For now, he is focused on helping Marquette win a national championship and “making most of where I am right now” while “getting one per cent better every day.” But Olivier-Maxence admits that he has thought about the draft and, given the strides he has made offensively and the size and versatility he brings defensively, he is well on his way to achieving his dream of reaching the NBA.
Cassandre, meanwhile, is a six-foot-two guard with similar ball skills and defensive instincts as her brother, which is part of what makes the siblings’ story so special: Even though they are several inches apart in height, they ostensibly play the same position and share lots of similarities on the court, which makes sense given how much their basketball journeys have been intertwined.
“We are two really big guards that can really impact the game in multiple ways,” Olivier-Maxence said about Cassandre and him. “Just being a threat to drive, to shoot. We can lock down one through five… being swiss army knives on the floor.”
But what makes Cassandre's journey different from her brother’s is that she didn’t have the same type of role models that Olivier-Maxence had growing up. As we know, resources for female athletes are spread thin in Canada, and there haven’t been many female ballers to pave a path from Quebec to the pros. Instead, Cassandre had her older brother to look up to, following in his footsteps and leaning on him for advice throughout her career.
“When I was like 12, I decided to really focus on basketball, and that's how I fell in love with the sport. But it's because I saw my brother succeed and I saw my brother just apply himself so much to the game that he is still such a great example for me,” Cassandre said.
“Because when I looked up to my big brother, it was basketball, and I just saw the way he loved it. So I was like: I love it as much as him… having my big brother show me a way, show me a path to basketball and show me how to succeed in it, I feel very fortunate to have him be there and lead a way for me.”
But when I say Cassandre followed in her brother’s footsteps, I mean that literally. Cassandre started playing competitive basketball when she was seven, but as a 14-year-old who needed better competition in Quebec, she joined her brother's club, Brookwood Elite, and started playing against boys her age. At the same time, she played with girls who were 17 and 18 years old, fighting bigger players to stay on the court while growing mentally.
“I think just like being able to play with the guys, that was the deciding — kind of like a big part of my life,” Cassandre said. “Just growth-wise, it was very challenging. Especially mentally just being the only girl but also being able to grow and be a great player in the guys team and being an inspiration to younger girls, that was an amazing experience.”
When Cassandre felt like she had done everything she could in Montreal at age 15, she moved to Capital Courts Academy in Ottawa, part of the Ontario Scholastic Basketball Association (OSBA). She loved the heightened level of competition and that she was closer to the Canada Basketball program.
In her first full OSBA season in 2021-22, after the previous one was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cassandre dominated, averaging a league-best 25.1 points, 13.7 rebounds, 3.1 steals and 2.6 blocks per game, leading the team to its first-ever OSBA championship and winning the league and Biosteel Player of the Year awards. At 17, she graduated high school early to join the ninth-ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish midway through the 2022-23 season as a five-star recruit and the 16th-ranked recruit in the 2023 class.
Cassandre felt like she was ready for a new challenge after dominating one of the best high school leagues in North America, and certainly the best in Canada. But she also felt she was ready for college because of her international experience playing with Team Canada, dominating both the Under-16 FIBA Americas Cup in 2021 and the Under-17 FIBA Americas Cup in 2022, while also training with the senior team more recently.
Despite only arriving at Notre Dame a month ago and being one of the youngest women in the NCAA, Cassandre already played a career-high 28 minutes in her most recent game. She believes that she has been able to get on the floor so quickly because of her defensive impact and how she can turn defence into offence, averaging almost a steal and a block per game.
Cassandre wants to win the national championship and get more comfortable with her teammates as the season goes on. But her childhood goal has always been to get to the WNBA — to not just become one of the select few Canadians and Quebecois to get there, but “to dominate. I want to be the best in it,” Cassandre said. In fact, one of the biggest reasons she attended college early is that she now only has three and a half years of college eligibility remaining. “I always have this goal in mind and knowing that the quicker I can get to the WNBA, the better,” she said. Plenty of young girls from Quebec will be watching her do it.
“I just see it as I have a great opportunity to do something for others and have great opportunities to set the tone earlier and be an example for others,” Cassandre said. “I get to be an inspiration for people from Montreal because it's rare that someone, especially a woman from Montreal, gets to be seen at a high level. So I see it as a way for me to be an example and help the women's side of basketball grow.”
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Just a couple of years ago, nobody outside of Canadian basketball circles knew about Olivier-Maxence and Cassandre Prosper. Now, one of them could be a few months away from hearing his name called in the NBA Draft, while the other is being spoken about as the “future” of the Canadian women’s basketball program at age 17.
Fortunately, what keeps the siblings going is their pure love not just for the game, but also for each other. No matter what happens on their journeys, they will always have each other to lean on and look towards.
“I’m so proud, honestly, like this guy, he deserves it all,” Cassandre said about her brother's success. “I don't know anyone that works harder than him. I think the way he thinks about the game and the way he wants to succeed so bad, that's what differentiates him from the rest.
“I know there's so much more ahead for him just because of his abilities on the court but also off the court how he is and he's just an amazing player but even more amazing person and even greater big brother.”
Canadian men often have an advantage when it comes to resources and representation in elite sport, and Olivier-Maxence always wanted to use his head start to help his younger sister, who is now a role model for the next generation of Quebecois women to follow.
“I mean, it's awesome really. It brings so much joy because you want your siblings to be the best version of themselves and you want them to be happy and do what they love. And that's exactly what my sister is doing,” Olivier-Maxence said.
“I’m very proud of her and I know she has so much more to come in her career, and I'll be right there to guide her through it.”