By Howard Tsumura
SURREY — Did you happen to see the current week’s B.C. senior boys high school basketball rankings for the Quad-A tier when they were published on these pages Wednesday afternoon?
There they were, South Surrey’s Grandview Heights Grizzlies perched all the way at No. 3!
You could say ‘Who?’ and you wouldn’t be wrong, yet in lieu of an initial double take, a more granular examination reveals accelerated progress with what has largely been the same core group of players at every turn along its five-year journey.
That’s another way of saying that while you may not have heard a lot about Surrey’s newest secondary school when it comes to the relevancy of its boys basketball program on the provincial stage, their ascent to the fore in this latest stretch-drive to March Madness suddenly carries a level of legitimacy after reading the fine-print of its dues-paying resume.
Consider: From a second-place finish at the 2023 Grade 9 B.C.’s, to a berth in the 2024 B.C. Triple-A tournament, to falling one win shy of punching its ticket to the last season’s B.C. Quad-A tourney.
If you took a poll to determine the team sport with the deepest and most competitive environment in which to compete in all of B.C. high school sports, the answer could well be top-tiered Quad-A senior boys basketball.
So what’s a team from an expansion school that hasn’t even graduated its first homegrown Grade 8-to-12 cycle of students since opening its doors in the fall of 2021 doing in the upper reaches of the province’s largest-tiered Top 10, rubbing elbows with the traditional, time-honoured blue bloods of the sport like Vancouver College, Oak Bay and Kitsilano and their 14 combined B.C. titles?
According to the veteran basketball architect of Surrey’s newest high school, it’s everything that can happen when group of players and coaches learn how to pull together in the same direction… at the same time.
“That was my vision… to go in and start it up grassroots,” explained Grizzlies’ head coach Drew Gallacher, 57, of what was indeed a unique opportunity to embed old-school coaching and program-building cornerstones directly into the figurative foundation of a start-up secondary school right in the midst of the basketball-crazy Surrey School District.
So just two seasons removed from leading its crosstown rival Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers to the 2019 B.C. Quad-A crown, Gallacher put that ‘grassroots’ mentality to work, joining fellow former Lord Tweedsmuir coach Harp Gill in the fall of 2021 as bookend coaching mentors on what would be the Grizzlies’ maiden voyage.
“Harp came in and took the seniors and would build down, while I took the Grade 8s and would build up,” said Gallacher. “And then once I got to the Grade 12s he would join me, and so that’s what he’s doing. He’s back on my bench”… as is veteran assistant Bill Bakk, who has coached alongside Gallacher ever since the fall of 2021.
Now, coming off an 8-1 regular season and earning the No. 1 seed at a South Fraser zone championship tourney which opened Thursday and to many boasts the deepest pool of teams in entire province, the goal is clear: To earn a berth to its first-ever B.C. Quad-A championship tournament berth in just the school’s fifth year of operation… just months ahead of 2021-22’s flagship group of incoming Grade 8s walking across the stage in cap and gown as part of the school’s Class of 2026
“I said ‘Well, that’s not going to be easy. But here’s what I think what we need to do…’ And the number one thing was to make them accountable in all areas of their life.”
A ROLE HE WAS BORN TO PLAY!
Ask Drew Gallacher about his own days as a high school student, and the Vancouver College graduate doesn’t mince words when the conversation gets around to his basketball-playing talents.
“My (playing) career ended after Grade 9, and rightfully so,” he begins. “I was not very good.”
Yet as he approaches the 40th anniversary of the Fighting Irish’s Class of ‘86, it’s essential to note that although non-typical in its fashion, Gallacher still found a way to immerse himself in the athletic culture of his all-boys school, and he did it by assuming the guise of the most recognizable mascot in all of B.C. high school sports.
“I was the Fighting Finnegan at Vancouver College,” he says of the purple-and-gold ‘dukes up’ leprechaun, who has preached not only the virtues of fighting for one’s team in the midst of competition, but of supporting one another in all aspects of life.
“It’s why I still try and schedule Vancouver College every year,” Gallacher explains.
Too insignificant, too trivial to include on any kind of a coaching resume?
Perhaps.
Yet if you exchange conversation for any sustained length of time with the teacher/coach whose surname is decidedly old-school, 10th-century Irish and translates as ‘helper’, both listening and watching to the way he responds to the things he’s most passionate about… you might convince yourself that the Finnegan was a character he was simply born to play.
To Gallacher there remains nothing, within the foundation of a team, more essential than a state of collective buy-in… all individuals contributing what they can for the betterment of the group.
When he came to the realization that he wasn’t good enough to make his own high school team, he became the Fighting Finnegan and supported them the best way he knew how.
And the spin-off from all of that?
“Like I said, I was not very good, but it sure motivated me to learn the game, and I had some incredible mentors, before the internet came, to learn the game,” Gallacher says of jumping head first into what was a self-starter’s quest to gain his hoop-coaching chops. “I was a student of it. I couldn’t get enough of listening to these iconic coaches about what to run, how to run it, all that kind of stuff.”
One of those ‘icons’ was then-UBC Thunderbirds head coach Bruce Enns, whose coaching course Gallacher enrolled in during the 1991-92 season while working towards his teaching degree on the Point Grey campus.
“It was called Basketball 200, it was my undergrad, and it was at 8:30 in the morning and I never missed… because Bruce was such an entertainer, oh my God, I loved the stories.”
Enns had one of his best ‘Birds teams that season, and Gallacher remembers him taking his team to the CIAU national tourney in Halifax that year and getting to the national semifinals on a team led by its superstar J.D. Jackson, who had been presented the Mike Moser award that season as the nation’s top player.
“They lost in the semifinals (86-75 to Brock), and then he got back and spent a week in class complaining about the refs,” laughed Gallacher.
“But the best story Bruce Enns ever told us was ‘There’s a guard at SMU (St. Michaels University School in Victoria) that is going to be better than Bobby Hurley’, and Hurley was in his prime,” Gallacher said, relating to the former Duke star and Vancouver Grizzlies point guard who is now the current head coach at Arizona State. “We all said ‘Come on’, and he was talking about Steve Nash.”
Then, after establishing himself in the Surrey School District in 1997, Gallacher met another of his mentors.
“I hitched my wagon with Bill Ruby over the early part of my career, and it was an amazing time of growth for me in my coaching career,” continued Gallacher of Ruby, whose impact on the game in B.C. has touched not only generations of student-athletes, but as well the playing, officiating and coaching sectors of the provincial high school game.
“He was the brains behind the show,” Gallacher says of the nine seasons (1998-2007) the pair spent together as part of Gallacher’s 15-season tenure at Tamanawis, one which included Gallacher leading the Wildcats to its first-ever B.C. championship tournament in 2009, as well as the 2004 B.C. Grade 8 title.
Ruby, who led Vancouver’s Gladstone Gladiators to the B.C. tournament in the late 1970s, pulled the trick again over 40 years later when he took Surrey’s Clayton Heights Night Riders to their first-ever B.C. senior boys tournament in 2010.
Gallacher also had Ruby as an assistant on Lord Tweedsmuir’s 2018 B.C. tourney qualifier, a year before he would lead the Panthers to a storybook 91-86 win over the Kelowna Owls in the B.C. Quad-A championship final.
The night before that game, Gallacher had quite famously called one of his true coaching mentors, the late Rich Goulet, for some coaching advice and it paid off with a game-defining 25-0 run between the third and fourth quarters.
It’s moments like that and so many more that make Drew Gallacher such a proud member of B.C.’s basketball-coaching fraternity, both at-large and within the hallways of his own school.
Ask him about about the gained wisdom he leaned on five years ago when he figuratively swung open a brand-new set of front doors at Grandview Heights and went about establishing an expansion program’s soul inside a gymnasium that had yet to hear an official ref’s whistle, and he’s quick to answer.
“It from my mentors, and they would include Rich Goulet, Ken Dockendorf, Rich Chambers, Bill Ruby,” he begins before addressing the coaching co-operative he has since seen flourish within the Grizzlies’ den.
“As of today, our boys program has nine coaches which is unheard of in this day and age,” he states proudly. “I can remember Doc (Dockendorf) and Goulet telling me how they were each responsible for two or three teams at a time just to keep their programs afloat. We have a battery of nine and we are willing to learn from each other, too. It’s a healthy, positive culture that we’ve created in the last five years.”
Speaking of learning from each other, Gallacher has cherished the contributions that the aforementioned assistant Bill Bakk has brought.
“We met when our kids where playing were YMCA basketball when they were in Grade 6,” says Gallacher, who would go on to coach his own son Jake, who played on Tweedsmuir’s 2019 B.C. title team. “I brought him onto our coaching staff (in 2021-22) because of the life lessons he teaches not only the students, but to me, too. He’s the wise man. And, he reminds the kids about bank shots, and hook shots, and Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics.”
Gallacher, Gill, Bakk and Nick Brown comprise the four-member senior coaching staff.
Former North Delta Huskies and Simon Fraser star Craig Preece is the head coach of the junior team where he is assisted by Bill Richards, the former player and longtime coach with North Delta’s Seaquam Seahawks.
Chad Olafson, who has coached at both Seaquam and Lord Tweesdsmuir, guides the Grade 9 team.
The Grade 8s are coached by a pair of former Lord Tweedsmuir players from the B.C. title season in head coach Jason Hans and assistant Sukhraj Hayer.
A CROSSING GUARD AT THE INTERSECTION OF HOOPS AND HUMANITIES
It’s been 40 years since the 1986 B.C. top-tiered senior boys basketball championship took place at the PNE Agrodome.
The Vancouver College Fighting Irish made the field of 16 that year, and thus so too did Drew Gallacher who patrolled its confines fashioned in the fearless frock of the Fighting Finnegan.
“I still bleed a little purple,” admits Gallacher, who this week has his No. 3-ranked Grizzlies sitting one spot behind the No. 2-ranked Fighting Irish. “It never leaves you.”
Might he hear about those comments come practice on Monday?
That, too, like the mornings he spent in one of Enns’ classes at UBC, would be pure gold.
Yet as important to him as coaching has been, so has his course speciality in the classroom.
“Predominantly, I started off and trained as a physical education teacher,” he begins. “But I kind of transitioned more into the classroom and teaching humanities. I’ve been teaching humanities for my entire career for 32 years. It’s a blend between language, arts, and social studies. And it’s a beautiful curriculum. Then when I opened up Grandview, I was excited because I had an opportunity to come and help run the student leadership program there. And that’s what I’ve been doing since. I’m the department head of leadership at Grandview Heights.”
Somewhere, in the confluence of humanities and hoops, in that sweet spot which ultimately defines the aura of the overall high school experience, lies the intangible essence of this teacher-coach.
Back in March of 2019, against a fabulously-drilled and talented Kelowna Owls team, it seemed easiest to label Gallacher’s Lord Tweedsmuir team as something of a one-hit wonder.
They came in as Fraser Valley No. 3 that year, but perhaps even more, they were that true under-the-radar team. Of course that made their rally back from 76-58 late in the third quarter the stuff of pure fable. You know, too good to be true. In a way, a lot of that is probably still true.
Yet the passage of time has only served to strengthen the belief that the ability to catch lightning in a bottle in the manner that they did can’t be accomplished without character seniors (and an ultra-talented Grade 11 big man named Jackson Corneil who went on to play volleyball for the perennial national championship-contending TWU Spartans), no matter how anonymous they may have been on their way to the title game.
And so from your author’s archives the memories still remain strong of three Lord Tweedsmuir seniors, both in and around that team, whose collective persona seemed to epitomize an underdog attitude and a will to conquer adversity.
And by looking back in that rearview mirror, a collage of their strengths as people and players provides the perfect canvas from which to gain insight into the kind of program being crafted by Gallacher and the rest of the coaching staff at Grandview Heights.
There’s Dylan Kinley, a kid who never played on the title team, but the season prior set the bar for what would be the next season’s class of rising seniors.
As a Grade 12, Kinley, in a revealing story with Varsity Letters, detailed his struggles with dyslexia, in the process revealing an inner strength which was clearly on display throughout his comprehensive U SPORTS career in Abbotsford with the Fraser Valley Cascades. Kinley graduated from UFV in 2025 and sits Top 10 in 15 regular-season all-time Cascades individual careers categories including second in assists (4.2 mpg), and third in steals (1.8 mpg) and tied for fifth in scoring (14.9 ppg).
“The word that comes to my mind with Dylan is resiliency,” said Gallacher. “For him to have to go through the challenges he did in class, and sometimes even to pick up some of the concepts on the basketball court showed just that. His teammates would bleed for him because he was just such a kind and empathetic human being.”
There’s Arjun Samra, the 2019 tournament MVP, who made academics the focus of his university of choice. Determined to enter the medical field, he nonetheless turned down other offers and later made a talent-stacked UBC Thunderbirds team while preparing for medical school. These days he is in his third year studying respiratory therapy at Kamloops’ Thompson Rivers University.
“Kerry Taylor told me he doesn’t remember a kid with a stronger finish, that helped one team get over their hurdles, as much as Arjun,” Gallacher relayed of godfather of boys hoops at crosstown Fleetwood Park Secondary. “And he was our leader on the court as well, because he worked so hard. He would get up in the morning and come to school at 6 and run hills before he would even go and shoot. And then he would go into class. His work ethic was just unbelievable. So I’m not surprised whatsoever that he’s now made this pathway to go into the medical field.”
There was also the heartbreaking story of Patrick Jonas, who tore his left ACL in the first game of what would be the Panthers’ championship season, and thus did everything he could to help his team through emotional support off the bench.
“Patrick was the one that had the most amount of growth in Grade 8 through 12 and it had everything to do with the amount of time that he was willing to put in individually,” said Gallacher. “He was in every single morning, every single night, nobody worked harder than Patrick in trying to up his craft.”
The end result?
Jonas made his goal of playing university basketball come true. Despite the arduous recovery from his injury and the COVID-cancelled 2020-21 season he managed to get in a handful of games with the Brandon Bobcats.
This season, one of the province’s best senior guards, Grandview Heights’ Cruz San Antonio, heartbreakingly suffered a broken leg in the opening game of the Surrey RCMP tournament in early January, making his return this season seem unlikely.
The game’s cruel twists of fate can not be predicted nor prevented, and yet there is no way to sidestep the pain. It must be met and embraced with the promise that silver linings have a habit of revealing themselves throughout the journey.
“Cruz was the MVP when we lost in the B.C. Grade 9 final,” Gallacher says of a mettle-testing 71-67 in double overtime loss to no other than Vancouver College. “To win the MVP from a losing team, it showed us all what kind of player he is.”
Yet Grandview Heights road from school-opening debut Grade 8s to their current season as seniors has not been without its share of bumpy moments.
Last season, when Gallacher was set to assume the senior varsity head coaching reigns of the Grizzlies’ core of largely Grade 11 players, the veteran coach could feel his gut talking to him.
“After we came out of the Grade 9 provincials, we got pre-ranked as number one junior team in the province in Grade 10 (2023-24). And it really went to their heads, to the point that for the first time in my life, I thought at the end of the year that I under-achieved as a coach. So I said to the kids that I believed that it was beneficial for them to hear a different voice.”
Gallacher stepped back, and fortunately for the program, a coach of the level of Graham Bonar was on hand to step in, keeping their evolution on the right track.
San Antonio’s loss has been huge, yet in his absence, senior guard Coen Wubs has stepped up in a huge way, teaming with fellow senior guard Xavier Riddler-Brown in the back court. Carter Latham has been another steadying senior in the starting group, which also includes top Grade 11s in guard Connor MacLellan and 6-foot-5 centre Ty Guiliani. MacLellan is already on the national radar having received an invite to national Under-17 tryouts later this year.
“I think it was the best thing for them and for me,” Gallacher says in confident reflection these days. “And so when I got back with them at the beginning of our season in September, we talked about how to change the culture, how to change our outcome from what we had in Grade 10. We sat down and we made a goal.”
It was to make the provincial championships, but Gallacher stressed to his players that it first had to include accountability inside and outside the team.
“And I’m really proud of that growth,” he says. “I think if we ever were to fulfil our goal of making it, it’s because of that shift in mindset, where they have to be better in all areas of their life.”
Grandview Heights and the seven other remaining schools in the South Fraser Quad-A championships will resume play with quarterfinals on Tuesday at Lord Tweedsmuir Secondary.
The schedule: 3 p.m. Tamanawis vs. Fleetwood Park, 4:45 p.m. Panorama Ridge vs. Holy Cross, 6:30 p.m. Semiahmoo vs. Lord Tweedsmuir, 8:15 p.m. Grandview Heights vs. Earl Marriott.
It’s as tough a field as you’ll find at any tier in the pre-provincial zone play downs, with seven of those eight teams having spent at least one week in the B.C. Quad-A Top 10 this season.
“Here’s what I say to people,” Gallacher begins when asked about how high the stakes get and how tough the battles become when South Fraser playoffs resume Tuesday with B.C. berths on the line. “Put on your seatbelt because it’s going to be a bumpy road. There’s going to be four exceptional teams that will not get to live their dreams.”
His team colours may have turned over the changing of seasons, yet nothing has dimmed the passion that Drew Gallacher brings to the court and gifts to his players.
Forty years later, he’s still the Fighting Finnegan.
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Drew is so right: VC never leaves you. But the nice outcome sees VC graduates (I.e., Dennis Kelly at Notre Dame) all contributing to high school sports excellence.
Drew is an unbelievable coach and great person. Whatever success Patrick Jonas has he owes to Drew. Drew held Patrick accountable at Tweedsmuir when he needed it. Patrick graduated with high distinction from Univ of Toronto and is now at Law school at Queens University.
Great article, Howard, and great work, Drew!