Vasiliki Louka is enjoying her new job in Sweden.
Not only does she get to play basketball, a sport that allowed her to develop into a star with the UNBC Timberwolves, but she’s no longer sinking baskets and blocking shots just for fun, she’s getting paid to play.
Louka is drawing regular duty as a forward for the professional Swedish Basketligin Women’s team in Helsingborg, Sweden. The team has struggled to a 1-20 record and ranks last in the 12-team league but Louka is getting plenty of playing time and says overall quality of the Swedish league is higher than that of top women’s pro league in Greece, where she played last year for Olympiakos in her Athens hometown.
“I’m not (scoring) as I used to do in college but I’m trying my best,” said Louka in a Zoom call from Sweden on Monday. “It’s a different level, a lot of professionals, a lot of Americans, so it’s not as easy. When you play professional you need to get better in every single aspect of your game because there are a lot of players like me playing in Europe.
“I think I’m better at understanding the game now, for sure a better defender because I need to guard players the size of me playing in Europe for a number of years.”
This is her second pro season since graduating from UNBC in the spring of 2019 and the 24-year-old Louka is on the national team radar in her home country.
Listed at six-foot-four on the Swedish league website, Louka has two games left with Helsingborg before she heads back to Greece to begin a month-long training camp in mid-May. She’ll be among 14 national team members preparing for Women’s EuroBasket, a 16-team tournament June 17-27 in Spain and France. The Olympic tournament is also on the horizon later this summer in Tokyo.
“Here in Sweden the league is pretty good, it’s better than the Greek league… there’s more teams with better rosters, so for me this year is a really good lesson and next year I hope I can get to a better league,” said Louka.
“I’m looking forward to finish the season healthy, go back to Greece, train with the national team and from there maybe try to qualify for the Olympics. It’s not easy, there’s too many good national teams, but we can try and make it, you never know.”
Louka has been selected this week for UNBCs Wall of Honour, and will soon take her place on the wall at the Northern Sports Centre, where a huge poster-sized photo of her playing for the Timberwolves will hang.
“I’m really excited and really thankful for this, not everyone can have the same experience,” Louka said.
Louka joined the T-wolves as an 18-year-old rookie in 2014 just as Russian coach Sergey Shechepotkin was taking over the reins at UNBC and gradually they built the team into a winner. Already accustomed to playing at a higher level with the Greek under-18 national team, Louka drew regular minutes of game time on the court her first two seasons and established herself as a dominant player underneath the basket and her T-wolves teams responded each year with more victories than the previous season.
Under Louka’s leadership, the T-wolves made the Canada West playoffs for the first time ever in 2017 and repeated the feat in 2018, while Louka was setting team records for points and rebounds in a season. In her final season of university eligibility the T-wolves went 9-9 in the season, their first-ever non-losing record since joining Canada West in 2012.
UNBC went on to post its first playoff win, defeating Trinity Western 80-78, before being swept by top-ranked Calgary in a two-game quarterfinal. Louka was named a Canada West first team all-star, the first female T-wolf to earn the honour, and ended her career as UNBC’s top female athlete for a third consecutive season. She is the T-wolves’ all-time leader in points, rebounds, blocks, and minutes played and ranks in the top five in career assists and steals.
“We built the team like a family, in my first year we had so many rookies and so many second-year players and playing together for multiple years actually gave us that feeling of family,” said Louka. “Sergey did a very good job of bringing in international players and also very good Canadian players and we had a really good team. The fact that we tried a lot to get better and to show to everyone we are a good team and deserve to be in this league and that Sergey did a really good job of finding internationals also helped the program evolve and helped us as players to evolve too,”
Louka was recruited in Greece by Shechepotkin and the decision for her to come to UNBC was made easier by the fact her older brother Vaggelis was also joining the T-wolves at the same time. The T-wolves women’s team had struggled the previous three seasons since joining the Canada West Conference as university team in 2012 and with no expectations to win, Shechepotkin started a youth movement that accelerated Louka’s development.
“When I first came I realized Sergey was playing the same type of basketball that I used to play, still very quick basketball with many transitions and many fast breaks but he still wanted us to think and put our minds in the game and I think that’s what made us unique in a way,” said Louka.
“When Maria (Mongomo) came she was a smart player, Maddy (Landry) came too and she was a really smart player and that’s why we were successful. We had players who weren’t just good athletes, they were smart on playing basketball.
“When I came to Prince George I learned what it takes to train to be a good athlete, not just a good basketball player. You don’t just have to learn how to put the ball in the basket, you need to be able to outrun your defender, outjump your defender, to get better on rebounds. Sergey helped me find myself and he let me play a lot, which is very rare for a rookie.”
Louka said her brother Vaggelis is part of a semipro league in Athens but he’s not playing this year because of COVID and is taking the year off to serve out his compulsory military training in Greece. She also stays in touch with Mongomo, now playing pro in the top women’s league in her native Spain for Club Baloncetro Bembibre.
