PITT MEADOWS 58 VALLEYVIEW 42
By HOWARD TSUMURA
LANGLEY — Remember taking your elementary school-aged daughter to a high school basketball game because as a dad, you knew just the simple act of doing so felt like your way of passing on a gift to her?
For anyone who has, fear not, because even if you’ve forgotten about the experience, it has its way of coming full circle on you and causing a sudden malfunction of the tear ducts when you least expect it.
That’s just what happened to Pitt Meadows Mauders senior girls head coach Jason Boyes on Saturday afternoon moments, after his Grade 12 daughter Jocelyn had capped off an amazing four-day run here at the Tsumura Basketball Invitational’s Select 16 by orchestrating a co-game-high 18 point performance to lead her team to a 58-42 win over Kamloops’ gutsy and upstart Valleyview Vikes.
“I’ll give you a story,” Boyes said, standing alongside Jocelyn after having had a moment to regain himself.
“When Jocelyn was, I think, in Grade six, right before Covid, we came to (the B.C. championships) to watch Prentice Lenz coaching, and he’s coaching his (own) kids,” Boyes continued of the late, great former MEI Eagles’ star who in that 2019-20 season, literally a week before the pandemic hit, coached the Abbotsford Panthers to an 85-77 win over Kelowna’s Okanagan Mission Huskies in the B.C. Triple-A title game at the Langley Events Centre.
“And we watched,” Boyes continued of he and his daughters Jocelyn and Rebecca. “His girls (Marin and Malia) are in the final, and I knew Prentice from youth basketball, so we came and watched Abbotsford in the final.”
(Editor’s note — Marin Lenz was named the 2020 tourney MVP, scoring 44 points in the final. This season she is an assistant coach with the Langley Christian Lightning team which this week took part in the TBI Super 16 draw)
Quite suddenly, internal neurons were firing and soulful connections were being made between the present and the remains of a day almost six years past.
“I saw when they won, and I saw Prentice with his kids, and I’m like ‘That’s amazing,’” said Boyes, who himself graduated from high school at Pitt Meadows in 1991 where he played under the late, legendary head coach Rich Goulet, two years after Lenz had graduated from MEI. “I wasn’t coaching at that point. But after Covid, that became an opportunity, and I took it.”
Lenz passed away suddenly on Nov. 30 of 2024, and just two weeks past the first anniversary of his passing, his presence has indeed modelled another generation of coaches.
“He inspired me, and now being around people like (Seaquam Seahawks head senior girls coach) Lucky Toor, Jocelyn’s club coach, and seeing him coach his own kids (Priya, Syra and Aaliyah) and seeing them win championships, that’s inspiring, too.”
It’s also a quiet way to keep perspective close at hand, to look out at the bigger picture through a mentoring lens which tells us that while what we see in the moment is gratifying, the full measure of what is actually at work has a depth we can only imagine.
On Saturday, Jocelyn Boyes admitted in the post-game that her thoughts were racing, and her anxiety was keeping her from being the best version of herself.
And so she herself sought in-game counsel.
“I love this team,” she said. “We’ve been together since Grade 8 and all the seniors I’ve been with have been so inspiring. But I mean, I was struggling at the start of the game mentally.”
Right about that time, one of those fellow seniors, forward Cadence Sironen, sensed the unease inherent in friend.
“She told me to focus on the game and not worry about the things that happen outside of it, but to use all that for fuel ,” said Jocelyn of Sironen, a field lacrosse standout and college recruit, but also a two-year starter on the hardwood who lost her senior basketball season to a torn ACL in the summer, but who has never left her hoops teammates and is still listed in the team program. “That really helped turn my game around.”
And thus it was game on.
Valleyview, it should be noted, was every bit a story as Pitt Meadows.
Under its veteran head coach Karen Horsman, the Vikes brought a seven-player team to the LEC, one which did not include a single Grade 12 player, and made their way through the entire championship side of the draw to play their fourth game in four days.
“I think we ran out of gas,” Horsman said, nonetheless as proud of her team as a coach can be. “We didn’t have as many players, but they’re a good team. No. 2 (Boyes) is really hard to shut down. And then when we tried to shut her down, they looked for No. 11 (Evelyn Perler), and she hit some threes. I had to switch to this zone (defence) because we were getting tired, but when (Perler) stepped up, that’s where it really got away.”
What made Jocelyn Boyes the obvious pivot point they needed to stop but ultimately could not?
“Just being able to attack the rim and then if you don’t stop her on the rim, she’s going to do a layup, but if the help side comes over, she’s dishing and then they make the basket, so it’s really, really difficult to stop a player like that, for sure,” said Horsman.
Perler finished with 16 points, her last four buckets all falling from beyond the three-point arc. And Grade 9 forward Kaydence McCaw, a softball athlete and 6-foot Grade 9 forward who looks pretty darn at-home in the low block, added another 11 points for the winners.
Claire McLoughlin, Valleyview’s dyanamic 6-foot Grade 11 guard, led her team with a co-game-high 18 points, while Sameera Gill, a fast-rising Grade 9 point guard, added nine points.
Of course the B.C. high school basketball community is a pretty tight-knit community, one whose membership asks nothing more than for you to simply love the game.
Bonds made early last a lifetime.
And as your authour thought about a lot of that while furiously typing this morning in a Langley Township hotel room about a mile from the Langley Events Centre, all of the connections come streaming back into consciousness.
How perfect is it that Jocelyn Boyes will play her university basketball next season in her own backyard with Abbotsford’s Fraser Valley Cascades, under her new head coach Al Tuchscherer, who himself is two years her father’s senior from the same high school basketball program at Pitt Meadows Secondary.
Tuchscherer, of course, also coached his own daughters Deanna and Julia, both at Chilliwack’s G.W. Graham Secondary and later at UFV.
Julia Tuchscherer, in fact, is currently in her fifth-and-final season of eligibility with the Cascades.
Boil all of this down to its elemental DNA and you’re right to say it’s ‘Just A Game’, but you’re also right to say it’s never ‘Just A Game.’
“And it’s not just about the championships,’” Jason Boyes said. “Being able to compete with your kids. Being able to spend time with your kids. It’s an honour of a lifetime.
This past weekend, our second of two annual TBI tournaments was all about girls basketball in the province of B.C., and being able to celebrate that is a thing of beauty.
So dads, just one request of you all this Sunday in the midst of our holiday season.
Go hug your daughters.
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