By Howard Tsumura
Varsity Letters
TOWNSHIP OF LANGLEY — Tyson Kenyon, Mason Nohr and the rest of the hometown Brookswood Bobcats spent virtually the entire game trying to rattle the equilibrium of their foes from Port Moody, the Heritage Woods Kodiaks.
Yet it wasn’t until the final two minutes of play Sunday that the 6-foot-3 Grade 10 forward Kenyon and 5-foot-10 Grade 9 point guard Nohr decided it was truly time to take the game in their own hands.
That’s when, over a span of 42 seconds, the pair manufactured a 7-2 run that seemed to best be described as the effect of catching lightning in a bottle.
Quite suddenly, the ‘Cats were ahead by 12 points with 1:22 remaining, enroute to a second Final Four appearance in four seasons here at the 2026 B.C. junior boys basketball championships, which played its quarterfinal round at the Langley Events Centre.
Brookswood went on to record a 57-46 win over Heritage Woods in a game made all the more remarkable by the well-heeled CV’s of the the game’s two head coaches: Heritage Woods’ Alex Devlin who played for the Canada at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics, and Brookswood’s Randy Nohr, also a former national team player, and the last cut on Canada’s team headed to the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney.
If one thing was clear, it’s that the drive and determination imbedded in the likes of Mason Nohr, and Kenyon, the son of former Saskatchewan Huskies star James Kenyon, the 1976 CIAU (now U Sports) Rookie of the Year award, as well as Heritage Woods standouts like Daveen Rahimi and Maartia Fakhar, the latter a ninth grader, it’s that they are getting world-class coaching at the JV level.
And no one was doubting the fact that Brookswood’s late surge decided the game.
“Yeah, that kind of sealed it for them, kind of took the wind out of the storm,” said Randy Nohr of a sequence that began with Kenyon making a lay-up in the lane, and then Mason Nohr intercepting the ensuing inbounds entry, and turning it another two points,
That sequence came in a span of four seconds.
Thirty-eight seconds later, Kenyon, who had gone 0-for-6 from three to start the game, ripped home a three-ball from the baseline corner, just in front of the Brookswood bench.
Added Devlin: “We were chasing that game the whole game and they’re a very good team. You know, they’re a good team.”
Still, it was easy to see as well how committed, both in mind and body, that these young Kodiaks were, especially Rahimi, who at times seemed strong enough to have the entire fulcrum of the game resting on his back, just waiting to be tilted in his team’s favour.
At one stage of the fourth quarter, Rahimi had scored 11 straight to keep the pulse of his team’s championship heart beating, including a pair of clutch triples.
In the end, he finished with a game-high 22 points, including 14 of his team’s 16 fourth-quarter points.
And Fakhar, despite being held to two points in the second half and 10 on the game, was just as thorny a prospect for the opposition in ways only an opposition coach can feel.
“Their two players, Maartia (Fakhar) and Daveen (Rahimi), I thought, just both played awesome,” volunteered Nohr. “We threw everything at them to try to get some stops and they both kept hitting shots. They’re a really well-coached team. I was saying to my team ‘I think they share the ball the best of any team in the tournament.’ So I was happy with our guys. We stepped up and made big plays when we needed to. We didn’t shoot the ball overly well, but we hit them when they counted.”
Post Marcus Tyler added 10 points in the win, while Heritage Woods’ Tika Bullock added six.
“All season, we’ve been talking about getting to this point,” added Nohr. “We’ve had a really tough schedule purposely. We’ve played a lot of really good teams, and we’ve had a lot of really close games for a really good junior boys team. That’s not overly common. But like I said, it’s much easier this year because there’s so many good junior boys teams. So we’ve had some great games with lots of people, and we’ve been lucky enough to win a lot of them down the stretch, too. Now, we’ve also lost some too, and that’s where we learned from most.”
Yet now it’s that time of year now, when taking a loss to learn a lesson won’t fly.
It’s Final Four time.
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