LANGLEY — Hope springs eternal here with all of us behind the scenes at the Tsumura Basketball Invitational.While our annual two weeks of early-season ‘Welcome Back’ to the B.C. senior boys and girls basketball world was, of course, cancelled this past December due to the global pandemic, we here at the TBI have our fingers […]
Author: Howard Tsumura
UBC’s Gabrielle Laguerta: Despite her battle scars and lost senior season, ‘Birds senior celebrates the silver lining of basketball’s shared experience
VANCOUVER —As Gabrielle Laguerta has gone about playing her role in the strangest year of our lives, UBC’s fifth-year senior guard has so often felt like an actor rehearsing her lines for a Broadway production she knows will never see the light of opening night.“I’ll come off a good practice where I’ve tried out this […]
VL Podcast 01.20.21: Simon Fraser head coach Mike Rigell on his football journey from BYU to the sidelines of Terry Fox Field!
LANGLEY — From a college football career at Brigham Young University to an NFL coaching internship under Andy Reid and Eric Bieniemy with the Kansas City Chiefs, Mike Rigell has travelled a long and winding road on his journey to becoming the head coach of Simon Fraser University football. Today, Coach Rigell joins the Varsity […]
Rowell and Aimaq! B.C.’s one-two punch of ‘Ty and Daws’ each play starring roles Friday in the WAC as Cal Baptist, Utah Valley both get big W’s!
It was a Friday night in which B.C.’s best Div. 1 men’s basketball talent took a backseat to no one in the NCAA’s Western Athletic Conference.Point guard Ty Rowell keyed a game-changing 16-3 second-half run with nine of his 17 points, the Langley-Walnut Grove grad never leaving the floor on a night in which he […]
“I have hope” says coach Clint Schneider: Each socially-distanced step an important part of Simon Fraser soccer’s journey to a hopeful 2021 season!
BURNABY — Will B.C. university sports in 2020-21 go down in history as the lost season?Or will the passing of time perhaps confirm a radically different conclusion, more akin to the season which taught all concerned a level of lessons more impactful than any could have imagined?Spend a few moments chatting with Simon Fraser University […]
VL Podcast 01.13.21: Author, author! Chris Kennedy takes his ‘Culture of Yes’ into its second decade with a message more relevant than ever
LANGLEY — Happy New Year. Our first podcast of 2021 features Chris Kennedy, Superintendent of Schools for West Vancouver, and a lifelong B.C. high school basketball coach. Kennedy’s popular blog Culture of Yes is now in its 11th year, and today the Richmond native stops by to engage our provincial audience with everything that the […]
It’s a continental hoops cuisine! Matt McKay’s virtual Sands Basketball Clinics unite B.C. & North American coaches in the name of the game!
NORTH DELTA — They say that silence is deafening, and in perhaps the cruelest of ways, that was the auditory state most common among both high school basketball players and their coaches as each began 2021 by walking into gymnasiums normally teeming with the activity of a season in progress.“We all realized that last Wednesday […]
Fardaws Aimaq: From Steveston-London to the top of the NCAA D-1 rebounding charts at Utah Valley…is the NBA next for B.C.’s rising 6-foot-11 star?
Look up… look way up!Okay B.C. basketball fans, do you see that name right at the very tip-top of the list of the leading rebounders this season for all of NCAA Div. 1 men’s basketball?In case you were wondering just where the winding basketball roads had taken Fardaws Aimaq ever since the 6-foot-11 centre took […]
A SUNDAY READ: It’s no fable! In 1952, before his 11 NBA championship rings, a 17-year-old Bill Russell toured B.C. high schools and discovered his hoops identity!
Malcolm Reid had heard the story many, many basketball moons ago.Last week, the head coach of the Vernon Panthers’ senior boys basketball team recounted it to me, and just like the day he first heard it from a man named Dick Abbott, it almost sounded like a fable.Earlier this month, Abbott — the father-in-law of […]
Our 12th annual edition: Who are B.C.’s Top 15 Grade 12 girls volleyball players? Check out our 2020-21 Dream Team!
LANGLEY — Way back in December of 2009, when UBC Thunderbirds’ head coach Doug Reimer floated an idea past me to honour the best girls and boys high school volleyball players in B.C. on an annual basis, little did either of us know that a dozen years later, the concept would be as fresh today […]