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 the Sweet 16 round schedule below that there are five teams with seeds of 17 or higher.
See our earlier story recapping all 16 first round games to see where the upsets happened because they were plentiful!
Regardless, the final eight games of Saturday on the championship side of the draw look superb.
Follow us over the course of the evening for updates from all of the games, but please know I can’t be two places at once… tried it, but it doesn’t work.
Cheers from the LEC
Howard Tsumura
GROUP 1
No. 1 Argyle 89 No. 16 Sir Winston Churchill 74
Luigi Carrion doesn’t have to dig too deep into his basketball vernacular to find the best way to describe his 6-foot-9, Grade 9 guard Nathan Szpak.
“He is just a stone-cold shooter,” said Carrion North Vancouver’s No. 1-seeded Argyle Pipers kept Vancouver’s Sir Winston Churchill Bulldogs at arm’s length down the fourth-quarter stretch drive of their Sweet 16 clash here at the 55th annual B.C. junior boys basketball championships at the Langley Events Centre.
Szpak, the younger brother of Pipers’ twins Jayden (6-foot-5) and Logan Szpak (6-foot-4), went on a tear, hitting eight three-pointers as part of a 36-point night (remember junior games are 32-minutes lomng, not 40).
He hit five straight threes and later a deuce as part of a 17-point fourth quarter, and none of it was fluff.
With SWC’s Amare Madahar, a 6-foot Grade 10 scoring machine, hitting for 30 against the Pipers, it was important from the Pipers’ perspective that they dial up an answer.
“The guy has tremendous heart and compete in him,” added Carrion, the team’s assistant coach and actin g head coach Saturday night. “He’s such a big dog in a little body.”
Szpak hammered home the point that three is better than two by hitting three straight triples that were diect answers to Churchill buckets, in turn makign the score 79-64, 82-66 and 85-58.
None of that stopped you from wanting some popcorn every time Madahar took on defenders off the bounce.
“I did a lot of scouting on him in the first game and I understood that he was the heart of their offence and that he is an amazing player,” said Carrion of the Bulldogs’ No. 13. “Amazing kid and well coached, and we knew we had to focus our defence on him. Once we made shots tougher for him, that’s when we took off and got the lead.”
Ilia Maydan with 16 points, Nathan Szpak with 14 and Ethan Mercer with 12 showed the depth and danger of the Pipers’ offence.
For SWC, Samuel Fisher added 15 points, hitting five second-half threes.
No. 8 Burnaby South 82 No. 24 RE Mountain 49
The Burnaby South Rebels are one of the very few programs of recent vintage here at the B.C. junior boys championships who truly know how tough it gets to win five straight games in four days and capture all the spoils.
In a season in which the top end of the blue-chippers is just starting to round into shape for a battle to the title game, the No. 8 Rebels haven’t been cast as the tourney favourites they have often times been.
Yet the little signs were there Saturdya night in the Sweet 16 round.
Keeping in mind that quarters in junior ball are only eight minutes long, the Rebels were especially prodigious on their way to an eventual 82-49 win over the No. 24 Eagles after scoring 29 points in the first quarter.
Strangely, they were held to only seven in the second quarter, but then they came out in the third and scored another 29.
A dryspell like the one they suffered in the second quarter would likely be the end of their them Sunday as they face the No. 1 Argyle Pipers Sunday in a 1 p.m. quarterfinal at South Court.
Yet while there were a myriad of upsets in Saturday’s opening round, it seems very clear that the best teams are now rising to the challenge.
Miguel Samson hit four triples on his way to a game-high 28 points for the winners.
Panagiotis Samaris had 21 points and Nolan Ellis 13 in the victory.
Xiuming He scored 10 of his team-high 14 for Mountain in the first quarter. Henry Paik added another 11.
GROUP 2
No. 4 Lord Tweedsmuir 73 No. 20 Brookswood 45
The way Raj Bagry sees it, the higher the stakes get, the more you just have to chill.
“It’s a clean slate when you come into this tournament,” the head coach of the Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers said following his team’s 73-45 Sweet 16 win Saturday night over Langley’s Brookswood Bobcats.
“You’ve just got to come in here and play,” continued Bagry whose team bolted out to an ealry 195 lead and never looked back. “(The LEC) is a different atmopshere and it’s a lot of pressure but I think everyone puts too much pressure on themselves. I tell our team to just play. Have some fun. Just enjoy it.”
One player who did just that?
LT’s 6-foot-2 Grade 10 guard Gurtaj Hayer turned in a terrific two-way effort, highlighted by a game-high 23-point performance.
“He’s one of our captains and he is very explosive,” confirmed Bargy of Hayer who extablished the team’s early dominance with 13 points in the first quarter.
“When I got him he wasn’t working as hard as he is now… they want to work on offence, not defence. But you put both of them together like he has, it’s dynamite. He wants to learn and that is heaven. That’s all you need.”
Jaideep Athwal added 12 points for the winners, while Carter Heilbron added 12 of his own in a losing cause for Brookswood.
For the No. 4-seeded Panthers, its win sets up an 11:30 a.m. South Court quarterfinal on Sunday against the No. 5 Vancouver College Fighting Irish.
Lord Tweedsmuir pulled out a three-point win over Vancouver College in the semifinals of the Irish’s Junior Emerald earlier this season before losing to Burnaby South in the tourney final.
“It’s going to be war,” said Bagry. “We expect to just come out and compete.”
No. 5 Vancouver College 54 No. 21 Salish 48
It was a day whose drama was built on the backs of its upsets.
Ask Vancouver College head coach Siamak Salehi about what that meant for his No. 5-seeded Irish, and on the heels of a 54-48 win over Surrey’s No. 21-ranked Salish Wolves, the answer was hearfelt.
“I told my guys ‘Hey, at the end of the day it’s not Xs and Os at this point, it’s pure heart and fight,’ because it’s a tough day having to play two games and it’s not like we’re the No. 1 or No. 2 seed and you get an easier first game,” Salehi said with a reference to last season. “Nothing has been easy today at this tournament. So forget about the seedings. We’re all playing tough teams, team we didn’t expect to be seeded this low. You’re going to have to come out and play.”
Both teams most certainly did.
Vancouver College, one of the most tradition-laden programs in B.C. history, and Salish, new kids on the block but showing with incredible purpose how much they care about building a consistent program the right way.
And when the Wolves’ Isaiah Samson knocked down a clutch corner trey with 2:15 remaining, Salish had smacked the Irish right in the figuractive chops with a 15-4 run that had tied that had taken it from a 42-31 deficit to a 46-46 tie.
But big three-points answers from both Ethan Chiu and Ren Hetherington, the latter whose triple accounted for his only points of the game, created just enough seperation to get the job done.
Chiu scored a game-high 24 points for the winners, while Alex Yan added another 11.
Samson led the Wolves with 14 points while Ty Pauga scored 11.
Both Chiu and Samson each drained four triples for their respective teams.
“We’d seen them earlier and they are gritty and hard working and they get up and down court, so we were expecting them to make their run,” said Salehi. “But at the end the guys held it together and we able to pull away and keep the win.”
The Irish advance to an 11:30 a.m. quarterfinal Sunday against the Lord Tweedsmuir-Brookswood winner.
BOTTOM HALF DRAW
GROUP 3
No. 7 New Westminster vs. No. 10 Kelowna
It was a day when some seeds had a little trouble holding water, but the No. 7 New Westminster Hyacks are have cut through the rough waters all the way to Final 8.
The Hyacks got 20 points from Grade 10 guard Gabriel Alucema as part of a 63-46 win over the No. 10 Kelowna Owls,
“They played as a team,” said Hyacks’ head coach Robert Maloto after the win, one which sends them into aan 11:30 a.m. quarter final clash with the No. 2 St. Patricks Celtics at Centre Court.
“We have always told them to go through our big guys,” Maloto continued. “We have a big team. But our guards really stepped up and played a very very disciplined game and I am really happy with their effotts.”
The Hyacks got 10 points and a bushel of boards from its 6-foot-7 big man Djorde Komar, as well as 15 points from 6-foot-1 forward Desmond Krashnica.
“Djorde Komar affected a lot of shots and that is our strength,” said Maloto. “We go through him and when we do, good things happen.”
On the facing the Saints on Sunday?
“They are hungry so they really look forward to this game, they have talked about this game with the coaching staff.”
No. 2 St. Pat’s 75 No. 15 Walnut Grove 31
The Celtics were never fully pushed by Langley’s Gators.
The No. 2 seeds went on a 26-0 run through most of the second quarter to build a 49-15 lead.
Jericho Labrador and Dhyne Cotin, both of whom have played in the major rotation for the school’s highly-ranked Triple-A senior varsity team, scored 19 and 18 points respectively.
Shayne Ahyeng-Vasquez scored another 10 in the win.
GROUP 4
No. 22 Sullivan Heights 56 No. 27 Lambrick Park 42
The Sullivan Heights Stars of Surrey needed an at-large bid just to qualify for these 55th annual B.C. junior boys basketball championships.
Now that they;re here, they are living large with one of the most unique big men in the province.
“The gravity he has even when he is not scoring for us opens up so much for everyone else on the floor,” admitted head coach Zoel Thibault of 6-foot-5 Dhian Sidhu after the No. 22-ranked Stars beat the No. 27 Lambrick Park Lions of Victoria by a 56-42 score in a game that out-punched its seedings with the power of Smokin’ Joe Frazier.
“He has been a leader all year,” continued Thibault before offering a sly smile. “Sometimes the big men are missed in today’s game.”
A trimmer version of Charles Barkley, but with an explosive face-up game?
An intangibles guy wherever he happens to be, using his hands for steals and deflections, and absolutely adept at running the point in his team’s half-court offence.
Sidhu was so clearly the difference down the stretch drive of the game. He only scored 16 points and had just two at the half, but a strength perhaps greater than his blend of agility and flat-out power comes in the ways he rises to the occasion in whatever department a game happens to demand of him.
Saturday, in the game that moved Sullivan Heights into the Elite 8 on Sunday against the defending B.C. champion and No. 3-seeded Terry Fox Ravens (1 p.m., Centre Courtt), it fell on the big man’s shoulders to make efficiency with every touch paramount against an extremely competitive and well-coach Lambrick Park team.
“That is a part of his game he’s always had and starting to show itself late, and what is great about our group of late is that everybody is trusting each other. There’s different moments when a different guy goes on a run.”
And what a run to the B.C.’s it’s been for the Stars.
They finished third in an extremely tough Surrey City playoff, then lost a double-OT thriller to Pacific Academy in the first round of the South Fraser zone playoffs.
At that point they were done.
But a call from the provincial tournament committee came and offered them a chance to earn a B.C. berth in a sudden-elimination game with North Vancouver’s Carson Graham Eagles.
Sullivan Heights won and made their opportunity look very well-deserved indeed.
“We had talked since the beginning of the season that the goal was to play here,” Thibault said of the LEC. “And I think the belief for these boys is starting to grow… that it’s more than just to get here…”
Ethan Bains with 13 points and Spencer McEvoy with 12 also reached double-figures in scoring for the Stars.
London Buck led the Lions with a co-game high 16 points.
No. 3 Terry Fox 55 No. 14 Fleetwood Park 49
The 2025 Terry Fox Ravens who began play Saturday on the first day of the B.C. junior boys basketball championships are about the furthest thing from the NBA’s all-star weekend celebrations.
“We don’t have a guy that is going to go out and drop 30 points,” co-head coach Mark Prinster said afte the No. 3-seeded PoCo squad exacted a 55-49 win over Surrey’s Fleetwood Park Dragons in the final game of the Sweet 16 round.
“We’re not that team. We play hard, we try and turn you over and we try and keep the score low as best we can.”
That’s not hugely different from last year’s Fox team which won the whole enchilada by beating St. Patrick’s in the title game, except that they did indeed have some guys capable of dropping 30.
A large number of the ninth graders on that team have since moved up to play on the senior varsity Ravens, which have clinched a berth to the upcoming senior boys provincials (March 5-8) at the LEC, and that gives you an idea of the amount of players coming down the pike and getting incredible coaching at Fox.
But perhaps more than any team remaining in the 2025 B.C. junior championship field, this Ravens team is a real Team Named Joe, or whatever moniker you wish to give it.
“Brad and I have always wantged to coach a team to play this way where we just get after you,” Prinster said of fellow-co-head coach Brad Peterson. “It’s all five guys buying in, and if one guy scores it was the product of all five guys working together. And they have really bought in to that because we’re really not that big.”
Prinster whispered that last part, but it’s not like it’s a secret.
They’ll play Sullivan Heights for a berth to the Final Four, and if they get there against a very talented Stars team that is on a mission very similar to their own, you can bet they won’t change a thing.
You may have noticed that I never mentioned the high scorers in Saturday’s Fox-Fleetwood game. You know what? I just felt it was better not to, and I have never, ever done that before. For some reason, it just felt right.
Here’s to Sunday and four beautiful games!
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