Howard Tsumura here, founder and writer of Varsity Letters.
Welcome to the quarterfinal round of the 2024 B.C. Quad-A boys basketball championships.
We’ve got complete coverage tonight of all four championship games in each of the four tiers of competition.
Keep checking back here throughout the evening for updates at this tier, but remember you can go to VarsityLetters.ca and scan our daily front page for complete reports from the other three as well.
Our four-person team tonight consists of myself at Quad-A, Dan King at Triple-A, Aaron Martin at Double-A and Nicolas Hauka at Single-A.
GAME REPORTS
QUATERFINALS
(All stories by HOWARD TSUMURA)
TOP HALF DRAW
No. 2 SPECTRUM 86 No. 7 BURNABY SOUTH 66
LANGLEY — They have not been to the Big Dance for 25 years, and of course until yesterday they had never even played under the big top of B.C. high school hoops here at the LEC’s Arena Bowl.
Yet Saanich’s No. 2-seeded Spectrum Thunder are not squinting at the bright lights two days into the provincial senior Quad-A tournament,
In fact based on their performance in an 86-66 win over the No. 7 Burnaby South Rebels, it’s doubtful they have even blinked.
Powered by its Grade 11 trio of guards Justin Hinrichsen and J Elijah Helman, and its 6-foot-8 forward Tyler Felt, the Thunder withstood the early onslaught of paint points from South’s 6-foot-7 forward Keoni Sacco to punch its tickets to Friday’s Final Four.
As head coach Tyler Verde said afterwards, the game wasn’t won strictly by the match-ups on the floor, it was decided more by the acceptance of his team that in order to take down the Rebels, there would have to an unflappable belief that they could actually do it.
“The first thing I said to the guys when we knew we were playing them was that they won’t go down without a fight… that you have to come ready to go,” he continued. “It’s going to be a dog fight, they are a championship pedigree program and everyone looks at us and they go ‘Who are these guys? They haven’t been here since 1999.’ This is first time in school history we’ve been in the semifinal.”
In a game in which no one led by more than three points until 2:17 remained in the first half, the Thunder’s 9-0 half-ending run was pivotal.
And when it grew into a 14-3 run between the halves, culminating on a Helman fast-break lay-in that made it 44-33, the Rebels never fully recovered.
Hinrichsen drew the tough job of trying to slow Burnaby South’s senior guard and backcourt scoring leader in Lordrikk Gutierrez and one day after he scored 30 points in a Round 1 win over Lord Tweedsmuir, he was limited to just eight.
“The game plan was to control 13 (Gutierrez),” Verde said. “He had 30 yesterday and Justin did a hell of a job on him with his length. He was a monster on defence and they don’t really have a guy that can match up with him so we really tried to deploy that. Then they sent Sacco inside and that left Tyler to shoot and people think he won’t shoot those, but he is one of he best shooters on the team.”
Felt was incredible, not only hitting a pair of threes as part of his 19-point performance, but blocking shots in play to create fast break lay-ins, and on one sequence with 2:29 left in the third quarter, went to the bounce from just outside the arc and dribbled right through the South defence for a lay-up.
“I’ve been working on things quite bit on the perimetre this whole summer and I think I have just been pushing myself to stay out of the post a little and just work on everything in my game,” said Felt, who in the absence of a full box score, surely stuffed a stat sheet in at least five major categories.
Helman led the way with 22 points and set the tone with his incredible hustle, while Hinrichsen scored 13 of his 21 in the second half. Guard CJ Zuno came off the bench and was excellent with 11 points.
Sacco led all scorers with 25, while guard Roan Mendoza added 13 points for Burnaby South.
The Thunder will play the winner of the day’s second quarterfinal between West Vancouver and Semiahmoo in the Final Four on Friday.
“I said to them there is zero pressure on them,” Verde added. “Spectrum has never done this before, it’s their path and they have to set it and they came out and they were dogs right from the very beginning. “Some teams might look at us and go ‘They won’t react to that’ but we react really well to that. Where I grew up (Prince Rupert), that is how you play the game and I try to instil that in them.”
No. 3 WEST VANCOUVER 70 No. 6 SEMIAHMOO 64
LANGLEY — Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that West Vancouver doesn’t play any defence.
In fact the key thing to remember about the tartan plaid-clad Highlanders is that, depending on the kind of game that is being played, they adjust their defence to the occasion and use it to win basketball games. Lots of them.
On Thursday, on a grand occasion which promised it’s a winner a spot in the Friday Final Four here at the LEC’s deafening Arena Bowl, West Van’s gritty and grinding defensive style added up to a figurative opposition lights as red as the red, red, red suit worn by its head coach, Paul Eberhardt.
“We have grown so much this year,” Eberhardt said after his team lost a 13-point lead over the course of the third quarter, then was forced to rally to beat the No. 6-seeded, defending B.C. champion Semiahmoo Thunderbirds 70-64.
“We like to run and (play) uptempo… so we beat Vancouver College in the Sea-to-Sky (title game) like 98-93, but then then we also beat Handsworth 62-56. So what we’ve learned is we can play any way and it starts with our defence.”
Yet the high drama of the evening came in the games final few minutes.
“West Van led 42-29 early in the third, but Semiahmoo’s heart of a champion kept beating, and led by its twin-tower combo of Jack Clayton and Jack Snead, South Surrey’s ‘Birds actually managed to come all the way back and even take a 49-48 lead early in the third.
But then the battle was on.
Clayton hit a triple with 2:08 left, then took a post feed and made an easy lay-in to pull his team back to within 64-62.
It wasn’t until West Vancouver’s Finn Chapman dropped a three-point dagger of a shot with 49.4 seconds remaining to make it 67-62 that there seemed to be enough breathing room for the Highlanders, opening-round losers here a season ago to Terry Fox, to punch their Final Four tickets.
“We just knew we had one shot and last year we let it slip away,” Grade 11 point guard Calvin Kuzyk said after the game of his life, dropping a game-high 36 points and making it a party in plaid. “We felt the same yesterday (in a tough win over R.E. Mountain) but we came together as a team and got it done. We all just believe in each other so much. We’ve been playing together since were in Grade 6 or 7, and we know we can come up big in the moment.”
The moment comes at 8:45 p.m. Friday when West Vancouver faces Spectrum of Saanich for a spot in Saturday’s final.
“They are young but their size is a problem,” said Eberhardt. “I have a good scout on them, watched them a few times but we are going to have to come up with a few ideas to mitigate their size, but our speed and quickness is pretty good, too. But we’re the underdog, no question and my boys are okay with that because they usually do pretty well we when they are the underdog.”
Chapman finished with 13 for the Highlanders, Max Fraser added 11.
Clayton led Semiahmoo with 26 points, Snead added 19 and Johan Waraich another 11.
BOTTOM HALF DRAW
No. 4 TAMANAWIS 65 No. 5 VANCOUVER COLLGE 54
LANGLEY — The last time Mike McKay was sitting in the head coach’s seat at the helm of a Tamanawis Wildcats team here at the B.C. Quad-A basketball championships, the Surrey team was built around one of the greatest scorers in the history of provincial boys hoops.
Remember back in 2018 when guard Miguel Tomalley was in his senior year and the Wildcats made their third Final Four in six seasons under McKay?
That season, as the Wildcats finished third in the province, Tomley set a four-game B.C. tournament scoring record with 180 points, a total which topped even the tourney’s five-game total points record of 177 set in 2012 by Sir Charles Tupper’s Cameron Smythe. It’s a record that still stands to this day.
Well, if you were expecting fire-wagon hoops this time around from the first Tammy team to wake up Friday morning with a 2-0 record and its own Final Four berth, you thought wrong.
On Thursday, it was with a defence-first attitude that the Wildcats deployed to stifle the Vancouver College Fighting Irish 65-54, it’s schemes so unrelenting that the Irish managed just one bucket from the field inside the three-point arc the entire second half.
“We’ve really amped it up on the defensive end the last month of the season,” said McKay, who in 2016 with a Grade 10 Tomley led the Wildcats to the B.C. championship final for the only time in school history, where it lost 87-72 to the Kelowna Owls. “We’ve been focussing on that because we know we can score when we have to. It’s been our defence that has elevated us to this point.”
Tamanawis broke free with a 13-0 run between the third and fourth quarters, breaking out of a tight-game down a point (41-40) to lead 53-41.
Switching focus to the other side of the ball, McKay’s offence couldn’t be any more different than it was in Tomley’s day.
This year we are eight-to-nine guys deep and we have seven-or-eight guys averging over eight-to-nine point a game,” he said of a group normally led by it’s 6-foot-7 Grade 12 forward Sartaj Bhangu.
On Thursday, on a night McKay felt his starters were not playing their best, Bhangu nonetheless scored 17 points. The coach actually went to his bench during much of the 13-0 run and key off the pine was 6-foot-5 senior forward Arjun Hehar who scored eight of his game-high 20 points in the third quarter.
Gursewak Mann scored 10 for Tamanawis, which faces the Oak Bay in Friday’s 7 p.m. semifinal clash.
Vince Velasquez hit six threes to lead all Irish scorers with 18 points.
Grade 11 forward Lucas Gonzales scored 11 of his 14 points in the second half.
No. 1 OAK BAY 89 No. 8 YALE 56
LANGLEY — The Oak Bay Bays are quite particular about that area of real estate on a basketball court referred to as the key.
To the Victoria-based powerhouse, in fact, it’s kind of like their own figurative private front yard, and if you choose to take a few steps through it, and maybe kick up a tulip bulb or two along the way, well… let’s just say it isn’t going to be a very pleasant experience.
In the end, that is the best way to sum up how the No. 1 seeds here at the B.C. senior boys Quad-A championships vanquished the No. 8 Yale Lions of Abbotsford on Thursday in the quarterfinal round.
“They are such a good team… their hands seems to be everywhere, just cutting us off, we just weren’t willing to cut,” said Yale head coach Euan Roberts after the Bays booked a ticket to the Friday Final Four against Surrey’s Tamanawis Wildcats with a resounding 89-56 victory.
“Our guys just decided that they were just going to watch Nylan,” Roberts continued of his son Nylan Roberts, the team leader and 6-foot-7 senior star. “(Oak Bay) tripled and doubled him and we were looking for cutters. We had a few guys cut, but we just didn’t have enough movement.”
Roberts still managed to score a game-high 24 points but much off it came after Oak Bay had already built a substantial lead.
The solution seemed simple.
With Roberts drawing a ton of attention there were opportunities to flood through the key and to thus dictate the tempo on offence, something Yale had done a lot of on it magical run to the second round of provincials.
Yet there is something about the way the Bays make it a prickly, sharp and painful experience that dissuades teams from engaging in it with any kind of real purpose.
“I don’t know if we took it away as much as we had a pretty solid focus on Nylan and Taige,” Oak Bay head coach Chris Franklin said of both the brother duo, which included 6-foot-5 Grade 10 Taige Roberts. “And so when someone commits two people to the ball, the other guys have got to make cuts. They had a couple early on but then it kind of faded away. But that’s an awful big load for Nylan to take on. Two guys on every single play, on him early, and if he catches it within 15 feet, we’re coming.”
If you watched what was transpiring as Oak Bay built a 24-9 first-quarter lead which continued snowball, you saw Yale coming down the floor, and by not establishing the commitment to make good, hard cuts, having no other option that to simply settle for deep threes.
And when they didn’t fall, disciplined Oak Bay’s transition simply came at them in waves.
“It’s just a willingness to do it, that is the way I look at it,” said coach Roberts. “In today’s game, a lot of kids don’t want to go through the key. They love standing on the outside all day. So all season long I’ve been preaching to them that that is where the action is. They had some guys that just clogged it up, our young guys… they are lighter but also they didn’t want to push through the girth of those big guys. They’re 15 (6-7 Owen Lewis) and 13 (Finley Lillis), they were good heavyweights. Taige battled but he could only do so much. They made it tough down there for us.”
Oak Bay hit 13 threes on the night.
Point guard Heath Taylor shot out a magic zone, hitting one six of them and finishing with a team-high 22 points. Thomas Beames added 20 with five treys. Bruisers Lillis (11 points) and Lewis (10 points) also broke double figures on offence.
Aaron Adams added 12 points and Taige Roberts eight in the loss.
FRIDAY
FINAL FOUR (at Arena Bowl)
GAME TIMES — 7, 8:45 p.m.
SATURDAY
CHAMPIONSHIP FINAL — 7:45 p.m.
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Howard, how are the AAA, AA and A tournaments progressing. Good to have you back! Cheers Stephen