Welcome to Day 2 of the 2024 B.C. girls high school basketball championships.
We’ll do our best to give you game recaps of all four quarterfinals in this tier being played today.
Please continue to check back throughout the day for updates.
As well, go to VarsityLetters.ca to catch up on all of the other reports from the Triple-A and Double-A games being played here at the Langley Events Centre.
B.C. SENIOR GIRLS CHAMPIONSHIPS
QUAD-A
TOP HALF DRAW
By Howard Tsumura
No. 1 RIVERSIDE 78 vs. No. 8 KELOWNA 32
LANGLEY — Avery Sussex and Jorja Hart are a lot like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, but the Riverside Rapids — like those great Chicago Bulls teams of the 1990s — have a lot of other essnetial parts working in their favour.
On Thursday, in the quarter-final round of the B.C. senior girls Quad-A basketball championships, the team’s two go-to scorers were on fine form.
Sussex, one night after scoring 37 points in the team’s opening-round game, poured home a team-high 20 points in the Rapids’ 78-32 win over the No. 8 Kelowna Owls, with Hart scoring 13 more.
But looking back on those vintage Bulls teams, you can’t forget about the versatile Toni Kukoc and dead-eye shooting Steve Kerr.
That’s the kind of stuff Rapids head coach Paul Langford was happy to talk about as the Rapids moved to Friday’s Final Four for the third straight season after the team got big outings from a pair of its Grade 11 guards.
Isla Kelly scored 18 points in the win and Annabelle Neufeld added 14 more, once again showing the depth of the No. 1 seed’s roster.
“She can shoot it and she is fast and super energetic for us, like she was today,” Langford said of Kelly.
Neufeld was also on when it mattered Thursday, hitting a pair of threes and going 7-for-7 from the field.
“Annabelle didn’t score the day before and she was disappointed,” said Langford, whose charges topped Mt. Baker 102-24 in its opener. “So I told her that I didn’t need her to score. I also told her not to worry and maybe she’d score today which she did.”
Cali Ausenhus led Kelowna with 10 points while Micah Ramsay added a further nine for the Owls.
No. 4 OKANAGAN MISSION 86 vs No. 12 LORD TWEEDSMUIR 78
By Dan Kinvig (Special for Varsity Letters)
LANGLEY — The Okanagan Mission Huskies’ first two match-ups at the provincial 4A championships could serve as a case study on the adaptability teams require to make deep runs in high-stakes tournament settings.
Wednesday’s first-round clash with the Walnut Grove Gators (a 75-54 Husky win) was a bit like surviving a demolition derby vs. a monster truck – the towering Grove squad boasted four players six feet or taller.
Thursday’s quarter-final vs. the Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers? More like a drag race.
Between them, the Huskies and Panthers boasted precisely zero players who stood taller than 5’10”. In lieu of size was a surplus of players who could handle, shoot and run the floor with equal dexterity.
It made for a highly entertaining match-up, with two mirror-image squads engaging in audacious shot-making at a breakneck pace.
When the proverbial dust had settled, it was Kelowna-based Okanagan Mission holding a Final Four ticket.
“It was a much different match-up (than yesterday),” Huskies head coach Meghan Faust observed with a smile in the aftermath of her team’s 86-78 win. “I enjoyed coaching this game a little bit better, just because of the speed and the back-and-forth play.
“Shout-out to Tweeds for coming in as a 12 (seed) and taking the province by storm a little bit here. I think that we matched up really well with them, speed for speed, and the thing I kept harping on the girls and the only thing that kept us going was our defence. Just focusing on getting on stops, not worrying about scoring.”
OKM controlled the proceedings for the most part, yet every time they threatened to pull away, the Panthers would respond with a run of their own to stay within striking distance.
Presley Hopf got off to a hot start for the No. 4-seeded Huskies, pouring in 12 first-quarter points as her squad opened an 18-10 lead. But by the end of the frame, Tweedsmuir had drawn even at 22-22 after a late three-pointer from Saavyn Mann.
OKM built a nine-point lead (43-34) heading into halftime, and broke the game open in the third behind a red-hot shooting outburst from Shae Sandhu. The Grade 10 guard showed poise beyond her years, pouring in 16 points in the frame, highlighted by a trio of triples, to give her squad to a seemingly comfortable 70-49 cushion heading to the fourth.
“She’s unreal,” Faust said of Sandhu. “She’s such a spark of energy when she gets going. She usually starts it on the defensive end, and once she gets a feel for scoring, you can’t really stop her. That third quarter really changed the momentum, I think.”
The Panthers never stopped clawing, though, and their own standout Grade 10 Hanna Grewal led a fourth-quarter charge. She went for 11 of her 26 points in the final frame, capped by a driving layup that cut the deficit to 81-76 with a minute left in regulation.
The Huskies got the requisite stops and free throws down the stretch, though, to see that game through.
Hopf (22 points), Jada Burden (18), Faith Hunter (18) and Sandhu (16) all posted double-digit scoring in OKM’s balanced attack. They move on to face top-seeded Riverside in the semifinals Friday at 6:45 p.m.
Mann finished with 27 points for the Panthers, and Sammy Ma added 14 points.
BOTTOM HALF DRAW
No. 7 YALE 74 vs No. 2 ARGYLE 66
By Dan Kinvig (Special for Varsity Letters)
LANGLEY — The Yale Lions have been a Final Four fixture at the B.C. 4A championships in recent years, true enough.
But this year? Few would have laid money on the Lions’ odds of making a deep run as a No. 7 seed.
Yet in the aftermath of a 74-66 upset victory over the No. 2-seeded Argyle Pipers, Yale is back in the Final Four for the third time in four seasons.
The most surprising thing about this upset was how routine the Lions made it look… at least through three quarters. Yale went up by as many as 24 points and looked to be cruising, but after four starters fouled out (not a typo), they had to hang on by their fingernails in the dying minutes.
“We were hanging on for dear life at the end,” Lions head coach Bobby Braich acknowledged with a smile afterward.
“We’re always a little under the radar, because we don’t have quite the arsenal some teams have, so we have to earn it the hard way,” he continued. “They’re homegrown grassroots players. We get them out of (W.A.) Fraser (Middle School), and we have them for four years with them. We don’t run any offseason club stuff, they just show up for the season and we try to do what we can to cultivate them.
“This is what you get when you have a lunch-bucket mentality, and everybody buying in. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
The Lions had lost both of their prior match-ups with the Pipers – by nine points in exhibition play, and by 35 at Tessa’s Tournament in early February. But the Abbotsford squad wasted little time serving notice that things would be different this time around – they hung with Argyle throughout the first quarter, then reeled off a 14-0 run in the second to seize control. The recipe was team-wide defensive intensity, and a whole lot of Ava Heppner on the offensive end – they senior forward poured in 22 first-half points to stake her team to a 44-27 edge at the break.
The Lions continued to cook in the third, extending the lead as high as 24, but they would eventually pay a price for their relentless physicality on defence.
On the final play of the third quarter, Hannah Singh – who, at 5’8”, had done an outstanding defensive job on Argyle’s 6’2” centre Nathalie Francis – picked up her fifth and disqualifying foul. Her exit coincided with an 8-0 Piper run bridging the third and fourth quarters.
In the final frame, Argyle continued to chip away, with point guard Reese Tam (11 points in the quarter) doing much of the damage. Then, with just inside of two minutes left in regulation, Yale saw three more starters – Heppner, Ella Bohn and Kendal Dueck, in that order – foul out in a span of 17 seconds.
The Pipers managed to get to within 71-66, but senior guard Maeva Carnahan led the Lions home. She went 5-for-6 from the free throw line in the final minute as nervous moments gave way to team-wide celebration.
“It’s a pretty good feeling for those kids (off the bench) who don’t get as much of an opportunity, to know they can come in and seal the deal,” Braich noted. “This sort of stuff, you grow exponentially. You can’t duplicate it in practice. You can practice for a year and not get to where we got to the last five minutes.
“I’m just so proud of them. They’ve worked so hard, and they love each other.”
In their recent Final Four trips (2023 and 2020), Yale’s title hopes were snuffed in the semifinals. They will look to take one step further this year, facing the winner of the late quarter-final between Seaquam and G.W. Graham at 8:30 p.m. Friday.
Heppner’s 29 points were a game-high for the Lions, and Carnahan (18), Bohn (12) and Singh (11) also scored in double figures.
Tam racked up 28 points for the Pipers, while Francis and Braeli Adrian scored 11 points apiece.
No. 3 SEAQUAM 87 vs No. 6 G.W. GRAHAM 60
By Dan Kinvig (Special for Varsity Letters)
LANGLEY — If the all goes according to plan for the Seaquam Seahawks this week, they’ll be experiencing a powerful sense of déjà vu at the Langley Events Centre come Saturday evening.
The Seahawks, diehard high school hoops observers will recall, emphatically announced their candidacy as B.C. 4A contenders back in mid-December on the LEC’s hardwood, with a head-turning run to the title at the Tsumura Basketball Invitational. The North Delta program’s march to that tourney crown was highlighted by a 74-68 victory over reigning B.C. champ Riverside in the final.
On the eve of March, back at the LEC for provincials, the Seahawks are building on the lessons they learned and drawing on those positive vibes.
“We treated that week pretty seriously,” Seaquam head coach Lucky Toor recalled on Thursday. “Back then, I had even made the comment that we were treating that as a provincials week. It was what a four-day grind against four great teams feels like at the LEC. Our mindset, our preparation, even simple things like eating routines was down to a T on those days. That is, I think, helping us here so far.
“They’re just mentally prepared, mentally focused off the opening tip-off. We haven’t had too much of an energy drop-off, and that’s what I’ve liked.”
Indeed, the Seahawks thus far have been clearly at ease in their pressure-packed provincial surroundings, turning in a clinical wire-to-wire win over the G.W. Graham Grizzlies in the quarter-finals on Thursday.
Seaquam was able to establish itself in the paint early on, with forwards Sydney Roufosse and Neelum Sidhu spearheading an early 17-5 advantage. Grade 10 guards Camryn Tait and Callie Brost heated up as the half wore on, helping their squad extend the lead as high as 23 points.
The blue-collar Grizzlies kept clawing, drawing the deficit back down to 16 points in the second half, but the Seahawks would pull away once again and the outcome was never in doubt down the stretch.
“At the end of the day, that’s a very hard-working team over there that’s well-coached, and we had to match that intensity,” Toor said of the Grizzlies. “It wasn’t the prettiest, but sometimes, with playoff basketball, that’s what it is. You’ve just got to grind out moments and make plays, right?
“Sometimes people think of us as just a perimeter team, and we do shoot a lot of (perimeter) shots, obviously. But if we can establish ourselves inside, we can play an inside-out game, and that worked well for us.”
When it was all said and done, five Seahawks scored in double figures. Tait scored a team-high 19, Syra Toor counted five three-pointers among her 17 points, and Brost (13), Sidhu (11) and Mackenzie Henderson (10) also chipped in offensively.
For the Chilliwack-based Grizzlies, Emily Sprott led the way with 17 points, Jada Paquin scored 13, and Ashlyn Adams added 12 points.
Seaquam moves on to face Abbotsford’s Yale Lions in the semifinals on Friday (8:30 p.m.) with a title shot on the line.
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