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 […]
High School
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 […]
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 […]
There’s a name for that dream! Carihi Tyees’ Emoni Bush, B.C. Girls Volleyball 2020-21 Player of the Year, takes her golden spike to Pac 12’s UW Huskies!
Ask Emoni Bush to trace the origins of her unique given name, and the senior volleyball standout with Campbell River’s Carihi Tyees delivers her answer with an appropriate hint of joyous wonder.“What I’ve heard is that it came to my dad in a dream,” says Bush.Trace the journey she has made in the sport over […]
Our 12th annual edition: Who are B.C.’s Top 15 Grade 12 boys volleyball players? Check out our 2020-21 Dream Team!
It’s Year No. 12 for the Varsity Letters’ B.C. boys Super 15 senior boys volleyball player rankings.Once again, our sincere thanks go out to the head coaches of four B.C. men’s Canada West volleyball programs who cast their votes from a pool of this province’s top graduating Grade 12 talent.COVID-19’s appearance on the scene could […]
He makes time stand still! Vernon Christian’s Liam Remple, B.C. boys volleyball 2020-21 Player of the Year, brings gift of flight to TWU Spartans
Liam Remple has inhaled the rare air of his sport enough times to have gained a critical appreciation of how sweet the view can be almost 12 feet off the ground.“It’s pretty crazy up there, I’m not going to lie” laughed Remple, the high-flying 6-foot-7 Vernon Christian volleyball star during a phone interview earlier this […]
Vancouver College’s Jackson Findlay never rests: BCSSFA honours the big-picture focus of Fighting Irish senior!
VANCOUVER — You’d be hard pressed to find a B.C. high school student-athlete who started the current academic year in September more prepared to stretch the limits of a standard 24-hour day than Jackson Findlay.And even though the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have curtailed so many of the goals he had set for […]
A Sunday Read: In 1958, UBC hosted the greatest group of NBA talent in B.C. history! Here’s how 15 future Hall of Famers hit the parquet at War Memorial Gym!
VANCOUVER — Cloudy, sunny periods, scattered showers, and a chance of … a lifetime.Excuse my indulgences today as I supplement the weather forecast of a certain spring day here almost 63 years ago because through the gift of hindsight, it all seems especially apropos.April 21, 1958.That’s the day on which perhaps the most amazing collection […]