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 […]
High School Boys Basketball
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 […]
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 […]
VL Podcast 12.10.20: Basketball B.C. prez Stu Graham on the culture of hoops in his early-1970s North Delta Huskies neighbourhood and beyond!
The Varsity Letters time machine spins the knobs and dials and heads back to the year 1971 to celebrate (a wee bit early) a very special 50th anniversary BC high school moment! Our guest? Basketball B.C. president Stu Graham has worn so many hats, and he brings the entire rack to the fore as he […]
A Sunday Read: Why Dec. 1, 1990 – the day the UNLV Rebels came to town – was the day Vancouver came of age as a basketball city!
VANCOUVER — I can still remember the day that the late, great Jim Taylor, the newspaper sports columnist of my youth and later a co-worker at The Province newspaper, invited me over to his Vancouver home so that I might conduct an interview for a feature story I wanted to write on him for my […]
“Ty has one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever coached!” High praise as Walnut Grove’s Rowell drops 32 points in Cal Baptist’s OT loss to USC Trojans
Longtime followers of the B.C. high school basketball scene will remember how Ty Rowell had a penchant for sinking baskets that could take your breath away.On Wednesday, however, as the NCAA Div. 1 college hoops season continued its run of season-opening games, Rowell turned the trick on his biggest stage yet.Almost a full year after […]
‘Your Coach Forever’: Tupper basketball’s Jeff Gourley on what needs to happen now to insure the future vitality of B.C. high school sports in the post-pandemic era
EAST VANCOUVER — If you’ve ever ventured into a gymnasium on the opening night of the B.C. high school basketball season — as a player, coach or spectator — you can attest to the fact that there is a feeling in the air as palpably uplifting as the one you feel on its final day.Sure, […]
Climbing Jacob’s Ladder! VC Fighting Irish big man Jacob Holt stokes Santa Clara’s gilded B.C. tradition! Broncos get another one of our very best!
VANCOUVER — Jacob Holt admits he was originally leaning towards playing his university basketball in Canada.One day over this past summer, however, Vancouver College’s then-rising 6-foot-9 senior forward decided to test the waters with a highlight tape he’d put together all by himself.“I probably got 40 calls… it was surreal,” the affable Holt recounted Wednesday. […]
VL podcast 10.28.20 edition: St. Thomas More teacher/coach and podcaster Aaron Mitchell takes us on ‘A Hoops Journey’
Welcome to the Varsity Letters podcast for Wednesday, Oct. 28. Our guest this week might be the only person to have led a B.C. senior boys basketball team to a provincial title as a head coach, while also having played in a B.C. senior boys hoops varsity final, a CCAA national final, and a U […]