By Howard Tsumura
Varsity Letters
(Varsity Letters will attempt to produce separate stories on all four quarterfinals at Sunday’s BC Junior Boys Basketball Championships. Check back throughout the evening. We’ll start here!)
TOWNSHIP OF LANGLEY — Last season, Vancouver College junior boys basketball head coach Siamak Salehi was quite content to roll with a roster comprised exclusively of 10th-grade players.
Yet the more he studied both the skill and collective will of a pair of younger Fighting Irish players, he realized that then-Grade 9 players Koen Li and Ren Hethrington deserved to be a part of that team.
“And they were spectacular for me,” Siamak said Sunday, easily remembering back to last season before returning to the present following his team’s 87-53 win overs Langley’s Walnut Grove Gators in one of four quarterfinals here at 2026 B.C. Junior Boys Basketball Championships, staged annually at the LEC. “They forced my hand to give them playing time as Grade 9s.”
The Irish, however, were unable to get past Surrey’s Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers in the 2025 quarters.
Fast forward one season to precisely the same juncture of the junior B.C.’s, and the lone pair of former-ninth graders are not only seasoned ‘veterans’, they have become the driving force of the 32-team tournament’s No. 1-seeded team.
Li, the 5-foot-9 guard, poured home a game-high 25 points, while Hethrington, a 6-foot-3 forward, added another 15 as the Irish not only advanced to Monday’s Final Four (6:30 p.m., South Court) where they will face another Langley team in the fourth-seeded Brookswood Bobcats, but improved their overall record to a perfect 32-0.
“They’re the engines that get us up and down the court and get us going,” Salehi continued of group that also includes the 5-foot-9 guard Lucas Villanueva, who also scored 15 points. “They get us set up in the half court, make smart plays, and they make good reads, and then they get the bigs involved.”
That’s a reference to 6-foot-6 posts Bruce Williscroft (eight points) and Balshaan Dhaliwal (11), who combined for 19 points in the victory.
“I told my bigs, I’m like ’As dominant as you guys are, you have to please your guards, because you can be Shaq, but if Shaq doesn’t have Kobe, he doesn’t get the ball, right?”
That slice of late 1990’s to early 2000’s NBA dominance has made his players do a little historical research to better understand the virtues of harmony between the front and back courts of any team.
“Like, you got to please your guards and make sure you’re building trust with them and they’re doing a good job with all of that,” the coach continued. “So chemistry is coming.”
On Sunday, No. 8-seed Walnut Grove, the East Valley runners-up, got a team-high 22 points from their own big man, talented Jaiden Aujla. Forward Nic Ribeiro Terso added 10 points, all in the third quarter.
The Gators switched things up on defence, coming out in a zone, yet the Irish’s ability to find enough early success to gain traction proved critical to the final outcome.
“We weren’t expecting them to play zone today,” Salehi stressed. “Last time we played them, they played us in man. But we’ve been working on our zone stuff over the last week and they came out in a 2-3. We moved the ball very well today and we hit some big threes from the outside. More importantly, though, what we try to focus on is getting out in transition. We were able to get stops today, and then get out in transition before they could even set up their zone, get some easy looks at the rim, and get up early, and then we kind of held that lead as we went.”
Villanueva shone on the defensive side of the ball as well. His second of two triples in the third quarter helped push the Irish lead to 63-29 and 24 minutes.
From that point on, over the final eight minutes of the regulation 32-minute junior game, the Irish held the Gators to only four points in the fourth quarter.
Now, with Brookswood beckoning, the Irish get the team that beat Walnut Grove in the East Valley championship final. The two teams have not faced each other this season but came close.
“They were in our Emerald tournament, so we have had a chance to see them, but they ended up losing in the semifinals to Burnaby South,” remembered Salehi. “So it’ll be our first time matching up with them. I know they got shooters, they got a good point guard (Mason Nohr) there who can hit shots and really get going, and then they got the big man (6-foot-7 Marcus Tyler) who’s really good at sealing down low.”
And about the pressure that the quest for an undefeated season inevitably brings, one the 2022 Irish conquered with their own perfect campaign?
“We got two more to go and we’re going to have a couple of hard games to finish this off,” he said of the road to the title.
Then, he added of the Irish’s 2022 B.C. championship team: “That was a good, talented group, and we’re trying to match that record now.”
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