The Fraser Valley is famous for its agricultural exports – blueberries, raspberries and the like.

If the roster of the Canadian national women’s basketball team is any indication, the region also happens to be a greenhouse for top-notch hoopsters.

Team Canada is training at UFV this week, and more than one-third of the roster – five players out of 14 – is comprised of homegrown Fraser Valley talent.

At the top of the list are Team Canada co-captains Teresa Gabriele and Kim Smith. Both players are Mission products, and are graduates of Heritage Park Secondary.

Backup point guard Kaela Chapdelaine is an Abbotsford resident, while forwards Kelsey Adrian (Langley) and Leanne Evans (Port Moody) round out the local content.

Remarkably, even Canadian head coach Allison McNeill, a Surrey product, hails from the Fraser Valley.

“If it’s something in the water, let’s move all the female basketball players out here,” McNeill said with a chuckle following Thursday morning’s practice. “A lot of the reason for it is, these are women who were put in good training situations. There’s no real secret to it – they happened to grow up here in Fraser Valley with good coaching and good teammates.”

On a provincial level, the depth of talent in the Fraser Valley isn’t exactly stop-the-presses news – the zone is annually acknowledged as the toughest in B.C. high school girls basketball. But the disproportionate Valley representation on the national team really drives home the calibre of talent in this area.

Gabriele, the starting point guard for Team Canada, said that her days playing on the super-competitive Fraser Valley AAA high school circuit went a long way to shaping her into the player she is today.

“When I was at Heritage Park, all of our rivals were from the Fraser Valley – Mouat and MEI and the other teams from Abbotsford,” recalled Gabriele, 29, who graduated from Heritage Park in 1997. “The Valley is still known as a basketball hotbed, and to have five athletes from here representing our country is kind of cool.”

The plethora of local content on the roster was part of the reason that McNeill chose to hold the second stage of Team Canada’s summer training schedule at UFV.

“We rarely get to train outside of Ontario, because Canada Basketball and all our staff are there,” she explained. “So it’s nice to showcase our players somewhere outside of Toronto.”

The ultimate goal for the Canadian women is to earn a World Championship berth. The Canucks will battle for one of three spots available at the FIBA Americas Tournament in Brazil in September, and McNeill has been encouraged by what she’s seen during training.

“I’ve tried to up the ante for them to be more physical, more communicative and tougher defensively, and I’m starting to see that,” she said.

The national team will participate in an exhibition doubleheader on Saturday at UFV’s Envision Athletic Centre. Canada takes on the NCAA’s Clemson Tigers at 6 p.m., followed by a scrimmage between the UFV Cascades women and Clemson at 8 p.m.