West Vancouver's Janet McLachlan was a dominant force in helping Canada's women's national team earn bronze at the 2010 World Wheelchair Basketball Championships last week in Birmingham, England.

McLachlan joined the national team prior to the Beijing Paralympics where Canada finished fifth. They improved on that placing in England despite playing with a relatively inexperienced lineup, McLachlan told the North Shore News in an interview Monday after getting back on this side of the Atlantic.

"You always want to shoot for gold and that's kind of the ultimate dream but to come away with a medal was a pretty good feeling," she said. "I'm pretty excited, actually. For me personally it's my first international medal, so that's something to be proud of and to cherish. I look at the team that we had there and how far we came in the last two years, a very different team than we took to Beijing. . . . In the last year or two years -- and even the last two months -- the team came so far and really came together as a group and that was something that was really neat to be a part of."

The Canadian team was looking for its fifth straight World Championship gold-medal placing but a round-robin loss to Australia knocked them off course, setting up a semifinal game against the 2008 Paralympic champions from the United States. Canada hung tight against the U.S. but couldn't pull out a win, losing 68-58. While the U.S. team went on to win the title over Germany in the final, Canada was faced with a rematch against Australia for bronze. Some strong second-half press-breaking from Canada's guards coupled with a monster 18-point, 20-rebound and seven-assist game for McLachlan helped the team avenge their earlier defeat and earn the bronze with a 59-49 win.

Those huge numbers for McLachlan were not out of step with her production throughout the tournament as she ended up with averages of 25 points and 19 rebounds per game, each of those landing her more than five above the next highest per-game tally.

Wheelchair basketball uses a classification system to evaluate each player's ability to perform skills specific to the sport and McLachlan is rated a 4.5, the number given to the most highly functional athletes. The lowest classification is 0.5. Each team cannot exceed 14 points amongst the five players on the court at any one time.

Carrying a 4.5 rating means that McLachlan is the team's go-to player when she is on the court, but the humble star downplayed the significance of her massive stats.

"To be honest I've got great teammates," she said.

She is, however, a highly skilled basketball player having played standup basketball for five years at the University of Victoria after graduating from Collingwood School.

"Scoring and shooting is something that I brought with me from standup and I was able to continue that with wheelchair basketball," she said. "It was a skill that transferred quite nicely for me but I have great teammates and I'm so lucky to be a part of this team. Give them all the credit -- those numbers happen to show up on my stat sheet, but they're the ones that deserve the credit for that, for sure."

McLachlan actually picked up wheelchair basketball after putting down standup basketball to try her hand at rugby. After a season of semi-pro hoops in Europe McLachlan, keen on reaching international heights, decided that her chances of making the national basketball team were slim so she took up rugby hoping that her strong six-foot frame would carry her far in that sport. A blown knee, however, ended that dream too.

"It was off the end of a lineout, I was following the ball across the field and my teammate had already tackled the girl on the other team and I was running behind the tackle and somehow they came back towards me and I didn't see it because I was looking across the field and they landed on the outside of my leg and it just folded," said McLachlan. "I bent it about 90 degrees sideways, tore up all the ligaments and cartilage and things like that. After that it was highly recommended that I no longer play sports that involved pivoting, running, jumping, that sort of thing. Or contact, for that matter."

While she was recovering from that injury a friend recommended wheelchair basketball for the rehab process.

"I loved it from the moment I got in the chair," she said. "It was a whole new challenge but I still got to play basketball."

McLachlan is able to walk now but standup sports like basketball and rugby are out of the question. But she is happy with where her athletic career has taken her.

"Honestly I think I'm pretty lucky," she said. "I've been lucky enough to try a bunch of different sports and play at a pretty high level in quite a few of them and I've ended up here. I have nothing to complain about at all. I'm lucky to play with the teammates that I have and to have met the people that I've met along the way and I'm having a blast doing what I'm doing right now. I can't think of anything better. Who knows what would have happened if something had gone differently? If I hadn't have injured my knee maybe I'd still be trying to play rugby, or maybe I'd have injured something else and I wouldn't have been able to play wheelchair. Who knows? I'm pretty happy to be where I am right now."

aprest@nsnews.com