LANGLEY — Basketball purists love to wax on about our beautiful game, and tell the stories about how it’s one of the last places where no opposition advantage is ever too great for a little ingenuity and a self-belief to overcome.Yet when the team in question turns out to be the too often times vertically-challenged […]
Author: Howard Tsumura
B.C. Junior Boys Saturday Sweet 16! Game reports as 32-team pool whittled down to it’s Great 8!
LANGLEY — Welcome to the second half of what has been one of the most parity-filled opening rounds in the recent history of the B.C. junior boys basketball championships here at the Langley Events Centre. Seeds Nos. 1-5, along with Nos. 7 and 8 managers to survive the first round, but you may notice from […]
B.C. Junior Boys Hoops! Opening round updates from Day 1 of the 55th annual championships at the LEC!
BY HOWARD TSUMURAVarsity LettersLANGLEY — We now have complete details from the opening round of the B.C. junior boys basketball championships currently in progress at the Langley Events Centre.Before we get to today’s 16 opening-round contests, here’s tonight’s quarterfinals (note first games start at 4 p.m. as per Group 2)TOP HALF DRAWGROUP 15:30 p.m. — […]
B.C. tourney time! Your schedules for B.C. junior boys, B.C. senior girls at the LEC!
By Howard TsumuraVarsityLetters.caLANGLEY — It’s eight straight days of B.C. high school basketball championship action beginning Saturday morning at the Langley Events Centre, and we’ve got the provincial tournament draws for all five events right here!~First, the B.C. Junior Boys 32-team championship draw gets underway Saturday through Tuesday.Here’s the complete tournament draw:2025JrBoysDrawThat will be followed […]
B.C. boys hoop ranks 02.19.25 edition: Quad-A Top 10 predicts tight Island, VSS and S. Fraser zone finals!
LANGLEY — There’s four zones represented in the Top 10 of the B.C. Quad-A rankings released Wednesday, and if their order counts for anything, it should guarantee three excellent zone championships on Vancouver Island, within the Vancouver Sea-to-Sky and in the South Fraser.Kelowna from the Thompson-Okanagan remains the lone outlier in the Top 10.Oak Bay, […]
A little left, a little right… OK, perfect! UBC’s Mona Berlitz finds her true basketball centre in the presence of team! Her journey from Germany to Vancouver now pointed at run to Final 8 national spoils!
VANCOUVER — When it comes to conversing, German is always going to be her native language.Yet there’s two others that UBC Thunderbirds’ 6-foot third-year forward Mona Berlitz seems to be able to speak with equal fluency.One is the English language and the other is the language of basketball.Put them all together and nothing gets lost […]
From Nanaimo-Oak Bay 1978 to the hoops madness of 2025: As an epic Vancouver Island 4A tourney tips Thursday, Ken Shields and a cast of others reflect on bookend similarities almost 50 years apart!
LANGLEY — Vancouver Island’s trio of Quad-A senior boys Top 10-ranked basketball teams in this, the 2024-25 season, are the single most dominant such bunch from one top-tiered zone in the entire history of the boys game in B.C.There… I said it.Not than anyone ever yells at me any more, but I think I can […]
As zone championship frenzy prepares to envelope the B.C. boys basketball world this week, SRS Top 50 reveals the calm before the storm!
LANGLEY — The latest in the SRS Top 50 courtesy of B.C. Basketball Metrics.
Happy, happy birthday… it’s Sweet 75 for the BC girls high school basketball championships! We re-visit a 1994 newspaper article that looked to the future as our girls step onto brightest stage yet!
LANGLEY — In keeping with its date of publication, the hue of its newsprint has begun its fade to yellow.Yet like a perfectly-launched fadeaway jumper, the feeling you get re-reading a pair of articles from the March 8, 1994 edition of The Province newspaper, some 31 years later, seems the same as hitting nothing but […]
02.12.25 edition: Kelowna tops Oak Bay, St. George’s edges Van College as B.C. Quad-A Top 10 boys emerge from shape-shifting week with eight spots swapping hands!
LANGLEY — About face.Maybe everything we thought we knew about the stretch-drive finish in B.C. senior boys Quad-A basketball was a myth?Not quite.But in one of the most active, topsy-turvy weeks in recent memory, the province’s largest-school tier switched up eight of its top 10 spots from seven days ago.The Kelowna Owls have been taking […]