LANGLEY — When the Dover Bay Dolphins senior boys basketball team prints up its final 2024-25 season statistics this March, they may want to add one new name to the box score even though she never played for the team.
The name?
Taylor Swift.
The stat?
One assist.
Even though the pop icon had the nerve to no-show for the Tsumura Basketball Invitational’s Super 16 championship final late Saturday afternoon at the Langley Events Centre because of some concert she was giving later that evening at B.C. Place Stadium, her mere presence in the region wound up making a big impact on B.C.’s No. 2-ranked Quad-A team.
The Dolphins capped off the greater part of a week in the Langley Township by defeating the underdog St. Thomas More Knights of Burnaby 108-69 in TBI’s showcase championship final, but more than that, there’s a 10-month backstory which preceded the victory.
And with Dover Bay’s quest for the B.C. Quad-A title now two weeks into its journey towards potential March Madness, it’s the timing of this weekend’s two events which seem to have gone a long ways towards bringing the Dolphins closer together as a team.
I know what you’re thinking, and indeed it all sounds like a stretch.
Yet the moment last spring when TBI organizers looked to the first weekend in December and discovered that Swift’s Vancouver tour dates happened to align perfectly with those of the Tsumura boys Basketball Invitational, there was another realization.
The global pop icon’s popularity put such a shortage on accommodations for teams from outside the Lower Mainland that the thought of postponing TBI altogether, moving it to a different weekend, or perhaps not inviting out-of-town schools were all considered.
In the end, it was decided that invited teams from outside the region would be accepted provided they first secured lodgings, a decision made so that teams would not drop out at a later date if those accommodations could not be found or fell through.
“So when you called in March, I got it locked,” laughed Dover Bay head coach Darren Seaman earlier this week of your author’s request. “It’s been booked since last March.”
Incredibly, Seaman was able to find a house for the entire team just four minutes from the Langley Events Centre when accommodations at area hotels were either already fully booked or charging two to three times the cost per room.
And with the luxury of an entire offseason with which to build into and around the Dec. 4-7 dates to insure full value, Seaman was actually just getting started. In the end, with an imposed reservation deadline putting him ahead of the curve, he and assistant coach Michael Linder turned the team’s TBI week into a meticulously scheduled five-or-so days of concerted team-building.
The best way to describe it would be Holistic: hoops/homework.
(Writer’s note: We’re not ignoring the actual TBI title game, but getting there by providing all the requisite underpinnings first)
“This is all to get the guys prepared for hopefully a bigger moment later,” Seaman said, eluding to the hope of qualifying for and making at a long run at provincials within the same LEC complex this coming March. “I have scheduled everything. They each get a schedule for the following day. It’s when their homework blocks are, when they train, when we do video. We’re eating meals together. It’s all laid out. Even the down time. We get them away from basketball… doing other things like going for team walks, going to the mall.”
All because of Taylor Swift.
Seaman even went so far as to secure the use of a private facility off the Langley Events Centre property where the team practiced.
“It’s a place where we are doing some skill stuff, some shooting, walk throughs with our defensive coverages. Just preparing for the team before us. They are getting the full experience.”
And a big part of that full experience is the camaraderie that comes with becoming a true basketball brotherhood.
Michael Linder, whose two sons — Grade 12 Frank and Grade 10 Joe — are two of the team’s cornerstone players, lent his culinary skills in the kitchen as chef.
“We had a great dinner tonight,” smiled Seaman after the team’s win over Burnaby South in the quarterfinals on Thursday. “We had Greek. Pitas, chicken, veggies, quinoa. And now, we’re going to have a second dinner when we get back with a lot of fruit.”
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The St. Thomas More Knights were the surprise team of TBI 2024 and no one was even remotely close.
Yet the Triple-A No. 3 Knights — who had stunned a pair of Quad-A heavyweights in No. 5 St. Georges and No. 4 Vancouver College on back-to-back nights just to reach the title game — had no stretch-drive answers left when it came to the fourth quarter Saturday against Dover Bay.
The Knights, in fact, who looked for huge stretches like they would push their Vancouver Island foes to the final buzzer, succumbed to an incredulous 35-4 game-closing run in a contest which for most of the way looked and felt nothing like it’s eventual 37-point margin of victory.
“We veered away from our game plan a bit, didn’t get get on the glass and contain them,” said STM head coach Denzel Laguerta, whose team, on the strength of wins over the Saints, Fighting Irish and Triple-A No. 1 MEI in its Wednesday opener, seem to have vaulted themselves into position to be possibly considered by the pollsters for the No. 1 ranking this week at Triple-A. “We also didn’t get out on the shooters, and at the point of attack we got beat. It’s hard playing from behind.”
Still, it was hard for opposition not to be impressed with St. Thomas More’s talent, spirit and most of all, their gumption.
And thus the basketball purists were treated to an incredible showdown of stars, because as Dover Bay’s 6-foot-5 senior tourney MVP Frank Linder caught fire late to finish with a game-high 33 points, his STM counterpart — 6-foot-3 senior Player of the Game Zeru Abera — countered with a soul-stirring 32 points of his own.
“He is really hard to guard because he likes to go one direction and then he shoots with the other hand,” said Seaman. “It’s really hard to guard and that is why everybody has a lot of trouble with him. He’s smooth. He gets to the spot. He changes pace. He is a really skilled player. And tough.”
As well, unflappable enough that Seaman eventually called off Frank Linder off as Abera’s primary defender, freeing his star up to attack more on the offensive end, and replacing him with the Grade 10 point guard Joe Linder, another blue-chip stopper.
That’s respect.
It’s also sound management of team resources.
A little less encumbered, Frank Linder simply exploded in the fourth quarter against a noticeably fatigued St. Thomas More squad, scoring 19 fourth-quarter points.
“The thing that makes (Frank Linder) so tough and why I think he’ll be a pretty good university prospect is because he can play almost any position,” said veteran West Vancouver head coach Paul Eberhardt, who provided game analysis during Saturday’s championship game livestream.
“He handles the ball well, he’s got great length as we know, he defends very well, he can go inside if he has to but he also shoots the three-ball very well,” added Eberhardt, whose Highlanders are situated on the same side of the draw as Dover Bay this coming weekend when the Dolphins close out three Mainland tourneys in three weeks at the Quinn Keast No Regrets invitational in North Vancouver. “I thought in the past that he relied a little too much on the three ball, but I have seen him play a couple of times this year now, and you can see him incorporating a lot more things in his game.”
And while Frank Linder may be the team’s true lynchpin talent, the Dolphins are by no stretch a one-man team.
It is, in fact, almost like an all-star team with every ingredient contained from the starting five through the all-important first couple of role players off the bench.
“They are such a well-assembled team,” STM’s Laguerta said. “They have the traditional parts. The point guard and the three-and-D with the Linders, they have guys that play defence and hit threes (Van Suiter, Evan Slater, Dane Schmidt, Andrii Zhukov) and they have a guy (Hudson Trood) that dirties it up in there.”
That’s a pretty sound thumbnail scouter.
After Frank Linder’s 33 and Joe Linder’s 17, Slater hit five treys and finished with 16 points. Suiter and Schmidt hit two triples each and each finished with eight points.
Trood, he of the flowing locks and Bill Walton-style head-band, put his 6-foot-7 frame to good use, hustling as always and finishing with 24 points.
Shane Deza complimented Abera’s 32 with 16 of his own. Post Logan Ball added 11 and guard Jacob Oreta a further 10 points for the Knights.
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All because of Taylor Swift.
Remember?
And with that in mind, we’ll close with what was best, not specifically about Dover Bay, but in a much more broad sense, about what a committed group of young student-athletes can achieve together when the great craft of coaching is allowed the time and the space to provide its thoughtful influence.
Darren Seaman indeed heard a lot of whoops and hollers this week from his players over the course of four days at TBI.
Given their success, of course, that is only to be expected.
But ask Seaman about the best sounds he heard over the course of this past week, and his answer might surprise you.
“One night we could hear them laughing and talking… the whole group was talking… like real talking,” said Seaman of the chatter both he and assistant coach Linder immediately picked up on back at the team house. “For us, it was mission accomplished because we want them to connect with each other’s voices. Talking their names.”
By this time, you may have gotten the idea that Seaman is no cookie-cutter coach. Instead, he’s a guy who constantly puts himself in the figurative classroom as it pertains to the intangibles of team dynamics.
And so for a former ultramarathoner who is constantly listening to podcasts to get up to speed on the latest in cutting-edge cognitive techniques, hearing his team engaged in light, collective banter was a revelatory moment for a lot of reasons.
Still, if you’re not north of a certain age line, it’s a little harder to appreciate without a little more context.
“We hadn’t been communicating well on the floor during games,” Seaman said two games into TBI. “So for this trip we are taking away (the players’) phones at night time. We are giving them about 15 minutes after this game to close the doors on the day with their family and friends, and then we take them.”
Ultimately, it’s about re-visiting the concept of team connection in an era where distraction is simply accepted as the norm.
Yet on the court, when collective backs get pushed up against a wall, and all the players have are each other, the speed with which a 2024 teen might summon his own voice for help in a tight spot like a rapidly-approaching half-court trap versus that of say, a teen in the late 1980s when things were more old school and so much less distracted?
I’d put my money on the older, the quicker.
“We’re trying to shorten the delay on the floor when you hear someone call your name in a coverage,” Seaman added. “We want to shorten that reaction.”
But also just foster a more genuine and open line of communication between everyone on the team.
Life is more than staring into a tiny screen. And basketball, at its core, will always be about more than sharing video clips and hoisting three-point shots.
It’s ultimately about hard work, trust and communication… those higher principles which ultimately manifest themselves back down on those 94 delightful feet of maple plank and varnish.
Live to those tenets first and then just see what happens.
That’s what the best of TBI 2024 re-affirmed to me.
And, oh, while I’d still much rather spin my original Silk Degrees or My Aim Is True, many thanks to Taylor Swift.
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