In its 17 prior contests this season, comprising Canada West league matches and playoffs, as well as U SPORTS national championship ones, the Trinity Western Spartans women’s soccer team’s 16-0-1 record showed both an aptitude and an ability to succeed at whatever kind of adversity had been placed in front of them, from injuries to […]
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Buchanan Cup 2021: The rivalry returns as a sell-out crowd of 1,600 packs Simon Fraser’s West Gym to watch the hosts top UBC Thunderbirds 90-82!
BURNABY MOUNTAIN — As Steve Hanson made his way across campus Saturday evening for the biggest men’s basketball game at SFU in recent memory, he just knew that nobody was in for an ordinary night.“When I got here at 5:45 (p.m.), I could already hear the 400 people who lined up,” Simon Fraser’s head coach […]
SFU’s pure-guts harrier Olivia Willett collapses on course at NCAA XC nationals 300m shy of finish: “My brain was telling me to keep going but my legs were Jello”
The late, great U.S. middle distance runner Steve Prefontaine would likely have been smiling from above Saturday morning.And not because a talented collegian, in the final race of her NCAA cross-country career, had collapsed on the course at the national Div. 2 women’s championship race just 300 metres from the finish line.“To give anything less […]
Despite mid-week re-start, Carson Graham’s Air Raid offence is on point, QB Mellish and Co. top Ballenas, head to B.C. Place to face No. 1 Langley!
NORTH VANCOUVER — The Carson Graham Eagles are flying high just when it matters most.When the B.C. School Sports ruling came down mid-week regarding the creation of two separate regional Subway Bowl championships, the Eagles went from preparing for the Langley Thunderbirds to preparing for Parksville’s Ballenas Whalers.Despite having to change everything mid-stream, the Eagles […]
Josiah Mastandrea: For the underdog in all of us, Simon Fraser’s gutsy senior brings heart-on-sleeve grit into Saturday’s Buchanan Cup clash with visiting UBC!
BURNABY — Josiah Mastandrea never figured he’d be a part of a night like this Saturday night, a night where the basketball-karma-ooze-o-metre breaks, the mercury spills and the crowd packed into the West Gym on the campus of Simon Fraser University goes wild.Yet as a testament to those players draped in the kind of never-say-die […]
UBC’s Jack Cruz-Dumont: As the Buchanan Cup grudge match resumes Saturday at SFU, ‘Birds starting point guard follows his family’s footsteps!
VANCOUVER — Even though it is arguably still one of a handful of the best basketball rivalries in B.C. basketball lore, it also is one which has been played so infrequently as to almost be forgotten by today’s generation of players.Yet something as glorious as the Buchanan Cup, the formerly annual men’s hoop grudge match […]
Off to a perfect 4-0 start, Trinity Western Spartans women’s hoops reaps rewards of studious work during 2020’s cancelled campaign!
LANGLEY — They are the kinds of numbers which, through the real-life rigours of a cancelled COVID campaign, seem even more distant and faded than they really are.Yet ask Trinity Western women’s head basketball coach Cheryl Jean-Paul about the early signposts she has spotted with her Spartans’ club in the formative stages of the Canada […]
Have goal, will travel: Trinity Western’s 26-hour marathon trip to U SPORTS soccer nationals in Nova Scotia mirrors Spartans’ own game-day resiliency along their journey!
Coming off 2020’s cancelled season and into a new one in which the norm has been to expect the unexpected, its perhaps no surprise to learn that despite a cross-country flight filled with folly, that the Canada West women’s soccer champions from Trinity Western University have arrived in Nova Scotia, stirringly unshaken, to battle for […]
Happy 70th birthday, Bruce Langford! The amazing journey of Simon Fraser’s ageless women’s basketball coach!
BURNABY MOUNTAIN — Ask Bruce Langford how many more seasons he is planning on coaching the Simon Fraser women’s basketball team, and instead of providing a direct answer, he quotes his wife Leslie.“When we go out to dinner with couples our age, they all bring up this ‘When is Bruce going to retire?’ stuff,’” Langford […]
UBC Football 2021: Gutted by playoff loss to Huskies, Birds’ coach Nill won’t skip steps that turns young team’s cache of promise & talent into its fully-realized potential!
The 2021 Canada West football season revealed a level of promise within the ranks of the UBC Thunderbirds that is darn near impossible to ignore.Yet in the immediate aftermath of a season-ending 39-17 loss Saturday afternoon in the Canada West’s Hardy Cup semifinals to the host Saskatchewan Huskies, ‘Birds head coach Blake Nill wasn’t about […]