By Howard Tsumura
LANGLEY TOWNSHIP — Illusions are best defined as the picture we see when our brains take shortcuts to make sense of the world in real time.
For just as surely as a straight stick’s image looks crooked when partially submerged in water, so too does a height-challenged basketball team seemingly grow bigger and stronger over the late stages of a hotly-contested game if it’s fuel is a never-ending supply of tenacity.
You can call the latter comparison a stretch if you like, but if you came with a lot of pre-determined notions based on the limitations of a ‘small’ basketball team — despite the fact they were the field’s No. 1 seed — and the thought that the brights lights and the dizzying heights of a B.C. Triple-A championship game’s fourth quarter would reveal all their figurative warts, well, then you might have thought you were seeing things.
It wasn’t an oil painting. Far from it.
In fact inside the final two minutes of play, against a desperate Langley Christian Lightning team which had rallied from a double-digit first-half deficit to climb within four points, three of Vernon’s top players — Adie Janke, Charlotte Routley and Chloe Collins, combined to miss six straight free throws over a 49 second span.
Yet somehow, a team whose main rotation players averaged just a hair under 5-foot-7 completed its four-game run through the field, grinding out a 71-62 win over the Lightning to capture the school’s first ever B.C. senior varsity crown at any tier, and one that comes in its at 57th year of operation. The Vernon senior girls lost in the 1982 top-tiered Triple-A title game to Penticton. The Vernon senior boys finished second in top-tiered Triple-A final in 1986, and placed second in again Triple-A in 2019. The only B.C. title in either the senior or junior ranks came in when Vernon took home top prize with a win over Westview of Maple Ridge at the 1987 B.C. junior girls championships.
“Every time we went on a little run, they’d come back and defensively we just kept going,” said Panthers’ head coach Dave Tetrault, 62, who has coached with the girls program for 15 of the last 16 seasons, including taking the helm for nine of the last 10 campaigns.
“Defensively we just kept going, and we talked about playing through mistakes. That’s how we played the whole season. We weren’t going to allow mistakes to stop us from the goal, which was to be the best team that we could be. I know we missed some free throws, but truly, that was likely our best game of the season.”
And that’s not to say that Langley Christian was a collective behemoth in the size department, either.
Yet as its quad-ringed head coach Danie Gardner chased her fifth overall B.C. senior girls provincial title, and her program’s third in the past six seasons, there was no disguising the fact that the 6-foot-3 Grade 11 shot-blocker Gaby Vis and the 5-foot-11 forward Georgia Van der Waarde were a starting front court puzzle that Vernon’s lone true interior player — 5-foot-11 senior Adie Janke — wasn’t going to be able to solve on her own.
If right about now your convinced your author’s narrative is being based solely on the results of pencil scratchings on a Ronald McDonald growth chart taped to kitchen fridge, there is of course more to it than that.
We’re talking here about No. 1 Vernon vs. No. 2 Langley Christian, a pair of teams who through the seeding process were deemed to be the 16-team draw’s two best teams.
There is a huge part of the story which casts Vernon as outliers despite that top seed, and it was all about whether a team, which on paper couldn’t say it had a single legitimate size mismatch the entire week, was going to be able to dictate the defensive terms that few if any teams its size, especially in our current era, have been able to do at the B.C. championships.
Yet through its own necessity Vernon has, perhaps more than any team within the entire galaxy of B.C. senior girls teams this season, earned its reputation for playing 40 indefatigable minutes of basketball every time its players step between the lines.
And when the aforementioned Chloe Collins, put the finishing touch on what was the game of her life by nailing a tough step-back 18-foot jumper with 4:35 remaining to put her team up 66-55, you might have taken a second to rub your eyes.
Collins would go on to score a game-high 30 points, her teammates and coaches would storm the court at the LEC’s Arena Bowl, and it was at that moment that you knew two things: The stick wasn’t really crooked and the Panthers were indeed larger than life as they body-slammed each other to ‘We Are The Champions’.
WHY THE LEC IS SO SWEET FOR CHLOE COLLINS
You might say that Chloe Collins, who celebrated her 18th birthday on the first day of the tournament this past Wednesday, was born to play basketball at the Langley Events Centre.
In fact if you’ve ever wondered about just how much the longtime home of the championships has become the touchstone destination of every high school basketball player in our province, then let Collins’ story be both chapter and verse.
With her dad Andy ingrained in the Vernon-area coaching scene, Collins progressed quickly from her older basketball-playing sibling Olivia’s tag-along little sister to the kind of player whose appetite for both the physical and the mental side of the game became insatiable.
Back in 2019, with dad Andy coaching at nearby Kalamalka Secondary and sister Olivia a 10th grader on the team, a 12-year-old Collins got a chance to watch the junior girls BC’s at the LEC.
“I think she already had her spin-the-ball-on-her finger thing down pretty soon after that,” Andy Collins said Sunday in reflection. “She’d been working on it since she was in Grade 6 ’til now.”
Of course what the dad is referring to are the pre-game introduction videos so well shot and produced by the LEC’s technical crew.
They are played over the big screen to the voice of the public address announcer, and each and all of the players competing in either or both the Final Four and Championship Saturday nights is given a brief window of a few seconds to show a little of who they are to the rousing approval of the fans.
Every generation of players dreams, and ones who want it the most grasp for something they consider a tangible moment… one that is always just out of their reach. For a pre-teen Collins the video board was the first dangling carrot.
And even more profound?
On Saturday, at that very juncture in a championship game when a team must have someone step up and deliver in the heat of battle, Collins did just that.
Seven three-pointers, including three in a third quarter than set the tone of the stretch drive, putting her Panthers ahead 52-49 heading into the fourth in a game in which her 30 points, on the heels of 25 the day before in a Final Four battle with Prince George’s Duchess Park Condors made her eventual selection as tournament MVP an iron-clad lock.
“I’m just so grateful that I have all these girls here with me,” she said afterwards, pausing to chat with a reporter on her way to the locker room, but first having to find a table to put her MVP trophy on. “When I was down on myself, when shots weren’t falling, I had people picking me up and I couldn’t be more grateful from them than I am right now.”
Turns out that Collins, after seeing her sister play in both the 2019 junior final and later at the 2022 senior Double-A championships, not only told her family she was going to one day play in the tournament herself, but as she grew, expressed the ambition to play the kind of game that might warrant an MVP performance on the final day of her senior season.
“From a very young age, I think starting around Grade 8 (where she started her Vernon Panthers career on the junior team in 2021-22), I just wanted to be able to make a big impact for my team” she said. “And honestly when the buzzer sounded I was just in shock. This all feels surreal to me. I’m so grateful. So happy.”
Again, the Vernon attack featured balance and contributions in every area of the game from every Panther who took to the floor, and that was brought into focus even more clearly when Janke’s two early fouls in the first half meant all hands on deck.
Janke finished with 12 points, while guard Charlotte Routley and forward Caelyn Fitzpatrick had 10 apiece.
Routley was at her scoring and dishing best in the fourth quarter, and the defence played by guards Isla Jolly, Chloe Bicknell (four points), Fitzpatrcik and Ashley Yuson (five points) were all critical in game that featured five ties and 15 lead changes.
“I think the key I think the key today was we knww we didn’t have a big kid,” Tetrault said, his foundational truism part intentional and part unbridled pride. “I don’t know if you noticed but our No. 7 (the 5-foot-8 Fitzpatrick), who is not a big kid, was covering (LCS’ Vis). (Fitzpatrick) was physical and she just battled. You know, we’ve done this the whole season… where it didn’t matter how big the other team was. We were going find a way to play great defence and find a way to score enough to win. And that’s what we did today.”
Classy in defeat, Lightning head coach Gardner gave the Panthers their due on a night in which her team seemed just a hair off their usual efficiency in the shot-making department.
Couple that with the delicate situation that a bigger front court is always going to have in establishing leverage in the half court’s sweet spots when a smaller opposition team is as attack-minded and fearless as Vernon is and a three-person officiating crew in not going to miss a thing.
“Well, I mean, it’s hard,” said Gardner, who got 16 points from speedy guard Payton Brunoro, 14 more from fellow guard Sorell Lenz, and 13 from Vis. “They’re physical, they’re small. I think we were just quick to take shots, and we were impatient (4-for-29 from three-poimt range). And then if the defence is set, and it’s harder, you know… they’re ready for the rebounds, where when we moved the ball, we had way more success.”
Gardner also acknowledged the fact that Collins took advantage of her opportunities to help Vernon wrest control of the contest in the late stages.
“She was locked in and dialled in, and I mean she’s a fabulous player. You know, we weren’t smart at times and lost her, and that wasn’t was not our game plan. She can hit the shot if you leave her, and we did that a little too much.”
A COACHING HOMAGE AS COACH TETRAULT REFLECTS ON WHAT MATTERS MOST
It was impossible to ignore the emotion-tinged tone in Dave Tetrault’s post-game interviews. And it was for good reason.
Tetrault, a retired former science teacher at Vernon Secondary, assisted former head coach Lonny Mazurak for six years, and when Mazurak moved on to the UBC Okanagan, Tetrault assumed the head job.
He coached the senior girls for seven seasons, until 2022-23, retired for one season, then came back to re-assume the role in 2024-25.
The recitation of his Panthers’ CV holds even more meaning when you consider Tetrault cut short his retirement to come back and coach the current group of 11s and 12s.
“I’ve retired a couple of times,” he said. “I’m glad I came back because this group has obviously been special. And when you’re an old coach like me, it’s always great to win at the end because you think of all the kids that came before and had a chance but didn’t do it.”
It’s hard to overstate how many times that Vernon has come to the provincials with a chance, as this season marked its 20th trip in the last 21 seasons.
When Tetrault retired following the 2022-23 season, Vernon had gone 18 straight years, easily one of the longest, if perhaps not the longest streak in B.C. girls basketball history.
All of which brings us to the small world that is B.C. high school basketball.
Following its opening-round when over Cranbrook’s Mt. Baker Wild, one in which the situation dictated the Panthers play full-court pressure defence, the fury and the precision of their ways was immediately on display for a sparse crowd that has stuck around to watch the eighth of eight games in Centre Court, and one which ended after 9 p.m.
This part has been saved for last because it’s all about what makes the game so great, from kids buying in to a plan, to those coaches who have the ability to reach their players and to stoke their competitive fires.
The Panthers, due to matchups, never pressed in quite the same way the rest of the week, yet it was their focus and their ability to both deploy that press in whatever form it required, whenever it was required which seemed to define the team’s most dominant strand of hoops DNA.
“Their defensive integrity, they applied pressure at the right places at the right time against the right opponent, whether it was double-teaming in the full court against some of the smaller teams versus suffocating the bigs when they were playing out-matched from a size perspective,” said Cheryl Jean-Paul, the analyst on the TFSE live stream broadcast of all four of Saturday’s championship finals. “They followed their game plan to a T, and we talked about the teams that can do that for 4 quarters in a row tend to be the teams that win.”
And in all honesty, your reporter — thinking back to the coach who reminded him most of Tetrault’s style — started the post game conversation back on Wednesday with the Vernon head coach by telling him that “…whenever (former five-time B.C. championships head coach at Brookswood and Aldergrove) Neil Brown pressed teams like that back in his day, he would have heard about it later (edited for obvious reasons).”
It was, of course, prefaced as coming from the lightest part of the heart and in total transparency. For his part, Tetrault immediately realized the homage being paid to one of B.C.’s very best-ever high school coaches, and a guy who won titles with boys and girls senior teams.
“The last time we were here at your tournament,” he told me of playing in this past December’s TBI, “Neil Brown was here in the stands. He called me over and he said to me ‘I hear you play like we play.’ And I’m like ‘Coach, I’ve been waiting 35 years to have a team that could play like your team.’”
The ties between the two were in fact all over the place.
Brown coached former national team point guard Randy Nohr who was a member of those two Aldergrove title-winning teams in the mid-1990s, and Vernon’s tourney MVP Chloe Collins has since become great friends with Nohr’s daughter Jordyn whom she met in and around provincial team situations.
Jordyn Nohr, while playing at Brookswood, the same Langley school Brown had earlier led to three straight B.C. top-tiered girls titles, was named the Triple-A tournament MVP just two years ago. And Collins’ confidence and goal-setting as a player has blossomed, says her dad Andy, in the time she has played club ball under Randy Nohr and spent time talking about the game with Jordyn.
“The respect I have for that guy and the way that he taught kids?” Tetrault concluded of Neil Brown, “I will say this, that the energy that he got out of kids, if I could do that, I’d be doing something. You know what I mean?
“We’re not a big team, but we got big hearts, and we play we play a lot bigger than we are.”
They did just that on Saturday night.
No illusions. Just dreams. And a lot of hard work.
If you’re reading this story or viewing these photos on any website other than one belonging to a university athletic department, it has been taken without appropriate permission. In these challenging times, true journalism will survive only through your dedicated support and loyalty. VarsityLetters.ca and all of its exclusive content has been created to serve B.C.’s high school and university sports community with hard work, integrity and respect. Feel free to drop us a line any time at howardtsumura@gmail.com.
Congratulations to the Vernon Panthers! A very well deserved championship.
Now…maybe, just maybe, Vancouver College will rise again and win their first BC Varsity Boys 4A Basketball Championship since 1967. 🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🏀🏀🏀
How come no coverage for senior girls basketball 4A final?
Excellent coverage of the B/C Basketball Championship Game, the players & coaches. Dave Tétreault certainly followed Neil Brown in teaching Vernon Panthers how to get the most out of their game & play big.