LANGLEY — One year later, it’s time to cue the comeback… or should that be ‘Q’ the comeback?Fans of the men’s basketball team at Trinity Western University are clearly hoping so.On Thursday, the Spartans faithful as well as Canada West hoops afficionados will have their first opportunity since the early days of 2020 to watch […]
University
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 01.20.21: Simon Fraser head coach Mike Rigell on his football journey from BYU to the sidelines of Terry Fox Field!
LANGLEY — From a college football career at Brigham Young University to an NFL coaching internship under Andy Reid and Eric Bieniemy with the Kansas City Chiefs, Mike Rigell has travelled a long and winding road on his journey to becoming the head coach of Simon Fraser University football. Today, Coach Rigell joins the Varsity […]
“I have hope” says coach Clint Schneider: Each socially-distanced step an important part of Simon Fraser soccer’s journey to a hopeful 2021 season!
BURNABY — Will B.C. university sports in 2020-21 go down in history as the lost season?Or will the passing of time perhaps confirm a radically different conclusion, more akin to the season which taught all concerned a level of lessons more impactful than any could have imagined?Spend a few moments chatting with Simon Fraser University […]
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 […]
Fardaws Aimaq: From Steveston-London to the top of the NCAA D-1 rebounding charts at Utah Valley…is the NBA next for B.C.’s rising 6-foot-11 star?
Look up… look way up!Okay B.C. basketball fans, do you see that name right at the very tip-top of the list of the leading rebounders this season for all of NCAA Div. 1 men’s basketball?In case you were wondering just where the winding basketball roads had taken Fardaws Aimaq ever since the 6-foot-11 centre took […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]