Welcome to March Madness!While we all recognize our shared fortune in being able to complete last season’s 2019-20 B.C. boys and girls basketball championships just days ahead of the global pandemic’s arrival, there is, of course, the disappointing reality of having this season’s provincial tournaments cancelled.And although any kind of virtual celebration of our yearly […]
High School Girls Basketball
Tsumura Basketball Invitational: Optimism rules as we set tentative Dec. 2021 dates for an LEC return! Here’s our list of 40 boys and girls teams!
LANGLEY — Hope springs eternal here with all of us behind the scenes at the Tsumura Basketball Invitational.While our annual two weeks of early-season ‘Welcome Back’ to the B.C. senior boys and girls basketball world was, of course, cancelled this past December due to the global pandemic, we here at the TBI have our fingers […]
UBC’s Gabrielle Laguerta: Despite her battle scars and lost senior season, ‘Birds senior celebrates the silver lining of basketball’s shared experience
VANCOUVER —As Gabrielle Laguerta has gone about playing her role in the strangest year of our lives, UBC’s fifth-year senior guard has so often felt like an actor rehearsing her lines for a Broadway production she knows will never see the light of opening night.“I’ll come off a good practice where I’ve tried out this […]
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 […]
VL Podcast 11.25.20: Canadian coaching great Allison McNeill reflects on a hoops life with stops at Oregon, Semiahmoo, Laurentian, SFU and more!
This week, the Varsity Letters podcast welcomes a giant in Canadian basketball circles. Allison McNeill has touched the stars at every level at which she has played or coached, and today we cover some of the facets of her basketball life that don’t get as much attention! But first, we will talk with Coach […]
Makenna Jacklin: She’s not just a post player! OKM’s 6-foot-1 star works to extend game beyond arc ahead of NCAA D-1 career with Idaho Vandals
LANGLEY — If Makenna Jacklin has her druthers, the trajectory of her NCAA Div. 1 basketball career is going to follow a script similar to the one she so dramatically penned en route to helping her Okanagan Mission Huskies beat East Vancouver’s Britannia Bruins in the championship final of last December’s Tsumura Basketball Invitational at […]
Terry Fox’s Karin Khuong loses two-year battle with cancer, coach Carkner says her “courageous, fearless” influence continues to propel her Ravens
PORT COQUITLAM — Karin Khuong’s indomitable spirit has always been a vital part of the DNA of the Terry Fox Ravens’ senior girls basketball team.
Twenty teams for TBI 2020! Our roster for the annual senior girls Tsumura Basketball Invitational features B.C.’s best of the best!
LANGLEY — Our collective fingers are crossed with the hope that a safe fall and winter season is on the horizon for high school sports in the province of B.C.And in the spirit of that positivity, we hope that one of the final highlights of a challenging 2020 calendar year will be the latest edition of […]
Neil Brown: Brookswood’s legendary ex-coach on hoops retirement, Ace Konig and the path to hardcourt enlightenment
LANGLEY — If you followed Neil Brown’s Twitter feed this past season, then you know that in retirement, one of the most decorated members of the B.C. high school basketball fraternity is enjoying the full measure of connectedness that comes with mentoring hundreds upon hundreds of student-athletes over a coaching career that has touched parts […]
B.C. Quad-A girls 2020-21 preseason hoops rankings: With No. 1 Semiahmoo eyeing a three-peat run, we break down the Top 10 teams
LANGLEY — For Surrey’s Semiahmoo Totems, the beat goes on.Fifty-seven straight victories and counting against B.C. foes, back-to-back senior girls Quad-A titles, and this coming season, a chance to complete as dominant a three-season span as any team across any sport in the history of B.C. high school athletics.It was back on March 3 of […]