FINAL: 03.05.26 Day 2 reports from the 2026 B.C. senior boys TRIPLE-A Quarterfinals!

LANGLEY TOWNSHIP — Welcome to Day 2 of the 2026 B.C. senior boys Triple-A basketball championship, coming to you from the Langley Events Centre.

Please check back here regularly as our team of writers provide first-hand game coverage from the eight sudden-elimination games being contested at this tier.

Thanks for your loyalty!

Howard Tsumura

BOYS

TRIPLE-A (at Centre Court)

DAY 1

NO. 4 LAMBRICK PARK 80  NO. 5 ARGYLE 49

By DAN KINVIG (Special for Varsity Letters)

LANGLEY — Put yourselves in the shoes of a random Canada West university head coach who might have wandered into the LEC’s Centre Court on Thursday afternoon.

Imagine watching Lambrick Park Lions senior point guard Blake Pye go absolutely nuclear, dominating from opening tip to final buzzer, leading his No. 4-seeded Victoria squad to a comprehensive 80-49 triumph over the Argyle Pipers in the 3A quarter-finals.

And imagine realizing that Pye will be wearing the blue and gold of the UBC Thunderbirds for the next five seasons. 

Oof. The T-Birds have a good one. A very good one.

“His basketball IQ is one of the highest we’ve ever seen,” said Lambrick Park co-head coach Colton McKee, in the aftermath of Pye’s 36-point outburst vs. Argyle. “In fact, sometimes coaching him is a bit funny, because he knows the game better than anybody, including us (as coaches), I’m sure. He finds guys, he can see pockets. He can see where they (the other team) is, and he can see where guys should be or are going to be before they get there.”

Pye puts a ton of pressure on a defence, with the ability to rise up from beyond the arc, the strength and explosiveness to get to the rim, and the ability to dissect a defence by spraying sharp, pinpoint passes from one side of the court to the other.

After a so-so shooting performance in the Lions’ opening-round win over Penticton on Wednesday, Pye had it going from the jump vs. Argyle – he poured in 16 points in the first quarter alone. Lambrick Park raced out to a 14-3 lead, prompting a Piper timeout, and they were up 28-15 at the end of the first.

Argyle switched to a 2-1-2 zone defence in the second quarter, curbing Pye’s penetration temporarily, but the Vancouver Island zone champs found their rhythm late in the frame and pushed their advantage to 42-24 at the break.

Argyle scored first five points of the third quarter, but Pye and Grade 11 guard Adam Shi combined to snuff any hope of a comeback. Pye got things started with a three-pointer… then hit Shi for a triple on the next Lambrick possession… then stole the ball and got to the rim in transition. By the time the dust had settled, it was a 20-2 Lion surge, and they were doubling up on the Pipers by a 62-31 score. Pye scored 15 in the third, and Shi racked up 10 points of his own.

Lambrick Park cruised from there. Shi finished with 20 points, and Ohm Chaisongkram and London Buck scored nine apiece.

Nathan Szpak’s 14 points paced the Pipers, and Illia Maydan and Ethan Mercer managed nine points each.

Afterward, McKee noted the bittersweet nature of coaching a player like Pye as his high school career winds down.

“I’m happy to be in the semi, but sad that I won’t be able to coach him for more than another day or two,” he said.

“When he needs to turn it on, he’s had a couple of 50-point games this year, and then he’ll have a game where he has 12 points, but he’s also got 10 assists and 10 rebounds. He guards the best guys when we’re in man, and he’s one of our low guys when we’re in zone. He’s one of the more dynamic players.”

Pye, for his part, was motivated to come out strong vs. Argyle after he felt he wasn’t at his best vs. Penticton. 

“I’ve really got to thank my teammates for yesterday’s game, it was really on them for the win,” he said. “But I was ready for today. I really wanted this win. I know the time I’ve put in, so I just trust that work.

“It’s really a brotherhood. We’re a family on and off the court, and that brings us energy and togetherness in the game. We put in a lot of work off the court, in our own time, and we were really ready for this moment. We came prepared, we were watching film earlier. We were well-prepared, overall.”

Hard to argue with that. 

Hard to argue with that. 

NO. 1 ST. PATRICK 81  NO. 9 EDWARD MILNE 48

By DAN KINVIG (Special for Varsity Letters)

It’s said that nothing in this world can be certain, aside from death and taxes.

Let’s amend that list: Death. Taxes. And the St. Patrick Celtics senior boys basketball team making deep runs at the B.C. 3A championships.

Through two days of competition on Centre Court at the Langley Events Centre, nobody has come close to touching the top-seeded Celtics. On the heels of Wednesday’s 126-57 victory over the Mount Baker Wild, St. Patrick put on another clinic in Thursday’s quarter-finals, overwhelming the Edward Milne Wolverines 81-48.

If death/taxes/Celtics feels like a reach, it’s worth noting that you have to go all the way back to 2019 to find a provincial 3A tournament bracket that doesn’t have the Celtics advancing at least as far as the quarter-finals. That five-season stretch was highlighted by a back-to-back championships in 2022 and 2023. 

Every year, the cast of characters changes slightly, but the aesthetic remains. Celtics basketball has a distinct look and feel, and if we had to summarize it in a word: Speed. St. Pat’s plays extremely quickly, yet not out-of-control – their pace is seasoned with prodigious offensive intelligence and withering defensive pressure.

“A lot of run-and-gun, a lot of pressure on defence, and we have guys who want to do all that,” said head coach Nap Santos, breaking down his program’s DNA. 

“We’re not posting anyone up because we don’t have the size, so we’re executing all our offence and making sure we run the floor. Sometimes teams don’t get back on defence – well, we’re going to take advantage. That’s why we’ve been so successful the last number of years.”

And that’s why they were successful Thursday vs. Milne. Same as it ever was.

The Celtics’ start could hardly have been better – they opened the game on a 16-0 tear, with Jemuel Castro doing much of the damage offensively. Even when Milne thought they had an opening, the St. Pat’s defence would snuff it out. Case in point, Malakai Hills, the Wolverines’ towering 6-foot-8 senior centre, drove hard to the hoop and converted for what appeared to be his team’s first points of the game, only for them to be wiped off the board – Heracles Mai had stepped up to draw the charge. 

The Celtics boosted the lead to 41-14 at halftime, and that was despite missing a series of transition layups that had Santos scratching his head. The top seed eased home from there, maintaining a 20-plus margin the rest of the way.

Dhyne Cotin paced the winners with 27 points, highlighted by a trio of treys, Castro scored 21, and Jaiden Quan added 14 points.

Hills had to work hard for all of his team-high 15 points, and Parker Bligh chipped in with nine points for the Wolverines. 

This season, the Celtics have a strong case to be considered B.C.’s top team across all tiers. They’ve lost just one game all season, to the Dover Bay Dolphins – the top seed in the 4A draw – but it’s worth noting that St. Pat’s also owns a win over Dover Bay. They’ve also defeated a plethora of other 4A powers: Vancouver College, Tamanawis, Semiahmoo, St. George’s, Holy Cross… the list goes on.

Of course, remaining in that best-across-all-tiers convo will require two more wins, and the Celtics face a stiff test in the 3A semis in the form of the No. 4 Lambrick Park Lions. Tip-off is at 3:30 p.m. Friday in the LEC Arena Bowl.

“They’re really good,” Santos asserted. “Defensively they’re really good, and offensively they’re great – they have a lot of shooters out there. We’ll have to put a little pressure on them and make them feel the St. Pat’s Celtics way.”

NO. 2 L.A. MATHESON 70  NO. 7 BRENTWOOD COLLEGE 66

By DAN KINVIG (Special for Varsity Letters)

LANGLEY — L.A. Matheson Mustangs head coach Tyler Ram was settling in for a post-game interview in the aftermath of his team’s 3A quarter-final win on Thursday, when he was interrupted by fellow bench boss Mike Lee of the MEI Eagles. 

“Tell him it was all coaching,” said Lee, tongue firmly planted in cheek. “Be honest.” 

Ram chuckled, taking the playful advice in the spirit it was intended.

However, as he dug into the why’s and how’s of his squad’s tight-as-a-drum 70-66 triumph over Brentwood College of Mill Bay, Ram couldn’t help but deflect all the credit to his players. They’d weathered a serious storm – every bit of a 13-point third-quarter lead had slipped away, but they’d found some solutions down the stretch to punch their ticket to the Final Four.

“I’m really proud of them,” Ram said. “This is a very player-led team. I obviously do my job, managing all the personalities, but they are so player-led. They hold each other accountable – they lift each other up, and sometimes they tear each other down . . . but it works for us. 

“We have great leaders on this team, and they know how to stay composed and execute when they need to.”

The Mustangs will face the winner of Thursday’s late quarter-final between Lee’s Eagles and the Enver Creek Cougars in the semis (Friday, 5:15 p.m., LEC Arena Bowl).

The Matheson-Brentwood clash was within a possession or two until the midway point of the second quarter, when a dunkburst (defined as “an outburst of dunks”, you can look it up in the dictionary) shifted the momentum squarely to the Mustangs.

First, Joven Sanghera got ahead of the pack on the fast break to throw it down. A minute later, it was Damien Onokpite driving the left baseline to soar over a Brentwood defender for the right-handed poster jam. That put the Mustangs up 32-25 – the first time either team had led by more than two possessions – and the No. 2-seeded squad from Surrey was able to stretch the lead to 40-31 at the break.

“We really thrive off energy, and when we see those kinds of things happen?” Ram said, referring to the dunks. “That’s what really caused us to surge in the second quarter.

“We really play for each other, and these guys are all great friends. It’s a real brotherhood, and when those kind of things happen, they really cheer for each other and it gets us all going.”

Buckets from Sanghera and Onokpite to open the third quarter stretched the lead to 44-31, and Matheson appeared to be well on its way. Brentwood, however, found some traction via a 2-2-1 zone press – it left the Mustangs disoriented, and they struggled mightily to protect the basketball for much of the third. 

Meanwhile, Jaxen Lust – Brentwood’s burly 6-foot-2 power forward – was torturing Matheson in the low post. He scored eight points in the frame, sparking a 16-3 run, and the No. 7 seed from Mill Bay grabbed a slender lead (51-49) early in the fourth quarter.

But down the stretch, the Mustangs were able to settle down, take care of the basketball, and find some seams to get to the rim. Sanghera had a couple of super-clutch buckets in the paint, Jason Hothi scored on a lefty drive with a minute left in regulation to make it 70-64, and Matheson was able to hold on from there.

“They (Brentwood) did a nice of job slowing us down,” Ram analyzed. “We were getting out in transition in the first half and getting easy looks, and they threw on a bit of a press and a zone, and slowed us down a bit. I was a little bit surprised, because we’ve seen that a lot this year, so I thought we would have executed. 

“It’s something we’ve practiced a ton, but sometimes they need little reminders, right? They’re teenagers.

“But credit to Brentwood – they had a great game plan, and they’re a very well-coached team. I’m really glad we faced a team like that, because we needed a challenge like that.”

Onokpite (22 points) and Sanghera (20) led the way offensively for the Mustangs, while Hothi and Jaiden Shergill chipped in with 10 points apiece.

Lust was an absolute load for Brentwood College – he finished with a game-high 23 points, while Kang Cho and Jackson Lenarcic each registered 12 points.

NO. 6 ENVER CREEK 62 NO. 3 MEI 60

BY HOWARD TSUMURA

Varsity Letters

LANGLEY — When high school basketball teams collect one of their program’s small handful of wins that can actually be labeled as ‘historic’, it’s always under a more figurative forensic reveal that it’s peak moment is the result of the innumerable smaller moments that came before it.

On Thursday, here in the quarterfinals of the 80th annual B.C senior boys Triple-A basketball championships, the peak of excitement for Surrey’s No. 6 seeded Enver Creek Cougars came with 16.4 seconds remaining when senior forward Smeer Sandhar chased down his own miss of a three-point shot, up faked his defender on the lip of the arc, and let fly a three-point offering that sent his school to a 62-60 win over the No. 3-seed MEI Eagles.

The victory sent the Cougars to their first Final Four in its first trip to the provincials as a Triple-A school. The Cougars had made four Quad-A tourney appearances but has never finished higher than 6th.

“I kept on shooting with confidence… just because I missed one didn’t mean I wasn’t going to shoot again,” said Sandhar, who hit three triples on the game and finished with 15 points. “I knew I was going to hit it when I got the ball.”

The Cougars led by as many as 10 points early in the second half, but the Eagles just continued to battle back at every turn and this one was as tight and coin-flip like as befit a bridge game to a Final Four.

And when the smaller instances that led up to the game-breaking peak are examined a little closer, they seem to meet the credo of the team’s head coach Greg Reid, a former Centennial Secondary guard from the 1990s who played and learned the game from coaching dean Rich Chambers and played alongside the likes of former Centaurs like Chad Caldwell, Jeremy Low and Jeff Winslade.

“The whole season, it’s been about all 11 as a team, one group… everyone having each other’s back through the ebbs and flows of the game, continuing to battle, knowing that if we come together, anything could happen,” said Reid of the Cougars’ embedded mindset. “Tonight you saw incredible hustle from 14 (Gabriel Tsimoshkin) and when we ran into foul trouble how our Grade 9 centre came in and he played like a grown man. All guys battling, having each other’s back, and when they got beat back door the next guy stepped up. Shots went up and they hustled and they rebounded. They made the extra play.”

Tsimoshkin’s hustle was special.

Chasing a ball headed out of bounds on the MEI baseline, he hurtled himself with no thought to the fast approaching cement wall and somehow saved it from going out of bounds, where he then flipped it over his shoulder to Sandhar whose bucket pushed Enver’s lead to 59-55.

In the first half, 6-foot-5 starting senior centre Sahaj Hans picked up his second foul, and knowing his value on the defensive end against MEI’s tough, physical trio of Kaden Vandervelden, Mercer Thiessen and Caleb Dyck, he pulled him out of preservation’s sake, saving him as he watched 6-foot-4 Grade 9 Dilbagh Johal came in an kept the team’s identity in tact.

“I mean, the leadership that Sahaj showed, cheering the guys on,” began Reid. “He had 28 in our first win yesterday (over Sir Charles Tupper), but in this game, he knew his entire focus was on walling up and playing defence and rebounding. And he focussed on what it took to win instead of what it took to get stopped.”

Now, it’s a fourth-and-final battle this season with its South Fraser arch-rivals, the field’s No. 2-seeded L.A. Matheson Mustangs in Friday’s 5:15 p.m. semifinal.

The Cougars beat the Mustangs twice in league play this season, then lost to Matheson by a point in the South Fraser championship final, a loss that is represented in a gap of seven seeding numbers here at the provincials.

And that’s why Thursday’s game, despite what the seeds might have said, was a contest between a pair of very evenly matched teams.

Harshaan Toor, the lightning-flash point guard for Enver Creek, hit four timely triples and scored a game-high 23 points. Sahaar and Avi Khanna each had 15.

Vandervelden with 21 points, and Thiessen with 20, led the Eagles.

“It’s the highest finish in school history, and the boys are living for the moment,” said Reid. “And we’ll just continue to take it one day at a time.”

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