Final Four Friday 2026 Quad-A game 2: Where did this Dover Bay team come from? After win over Owls, an origin story that confounds!

NO. 1 DOVER BAY 92 NO. 4 KELOWNA 83

By Howard Tsumura

Varsity Letters

LANGLEY — In the quiet, whispered corners of the B.C. boys high school basketball coaching community, there’s been a version of a phrase that has been gaining traction the past few seasons.

Perhaps this morning, on the final day of the 2025-26 B.C. senior boys basketball season, it has become official vernacular within this tight-knit, homage-paying touchline of tacticians.

And that phrase is?

‘The Dover Bay Way’.

How else to explain, after falling to its Lower Vancouver Island foes from Spectrum in last season’s B.C. Quad-A championship final, that the Dolphins of Nanaimo’s Dover Bay Secondary are right back in tonight’s 2026 title game against the Vancouver College Fighting Irish, despite losing virtually all but one player who saw any substantial playing time from a season ago?

“So basically we got cleaned out, right?” agreed Dolphins head coach Darren Seaman in his usual succinct fashion.

Of course when that one player is the uber-talented Grade 11 point guard Joe Linder, you can at least rest assured that the first brick you lay in the new foundation is a good as gold.

Yet what if you watched last night’a Final Four Friday conclude last with Dover Bay’s 92-83 win over the Kelowna Owls, and all you knew about the Dolphins from this season was that other than Linder, their entire rotation from a season ago featured the likes of seniors Frank Linder, Van Suiter, Hudson Trood, Andrii Zhukov, Evan Slater and the Grade 10 Schmidt, the latter an obvious talent just needing an chance at extended minutes?

Then you took a moment of deep pause, and thought to yourself, ‘Yes, Dover Bay is the No. 1 seed based on an excellent season… but, how many times have you seen a team that gets to the Final Four with a seven-man rotation in which only one player — Joe Linder — is even close to understanding and experiencing the actual on-court, heat-of-battle pressure that a game of this magnitude brings?’”

The answer?

I thought hard during our Friday night broadcast of the game, then asked, on air, my TFSETV analyst Paul Eberhardt whose quick and correct response was the 1986-87 Richmond Colts, the Bill Disbrow-coached group which featured four starting Grade 11s — Ron Putzi, Brian Tait, Joey deWit and Damon Robb — and which beat MEI in the final at the PNE Agrodome in what would be the first of back-to-back then-top-tiered B.C. Triple-A titles.

That quartet rose to the senior varsity ranks in a very old-school late-80’s style by playing their Grade 10 years in junior before moving to the senior varsity.

But that was 39 years ago.

And so afterwards, the first question I had for Dover Bay coach Darren Seaman was: “How does a team with virtually no reps in the crucible come out and do what his team did Friday?

“We practised for this moment,” he said with an even-keeled delivery which every bit mimicked the performance of his team, one which came out with the task-driven focus of the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls en route to 70 wins and an NBA title.

“Like, they practised every day for this moment,” he continued. “We spent time every day for that kind of pressure. So that pressure was easier than what the five guys experience in practice.”

The Dolphins went out to a 20-7 lead despite the fact the Linder missed four first-quarter free throws, and truly never looked back.

They were, in fact, every part of what past Kelowna teams have been, based largely on your author’s memory, but strengthened by the fact that the Owls have set the template for any such discussions with seven Final Four appearance in the last 11 Quad-A Final Fours under veteran head coach Harry Parmar.

“We didn’t play,” Parmar said, his guru-like voice never waivering in the moment, despite the hurt he felt for his players. “We were passive most of the game. Tentative, passive, a bunch of turnovers. They just take… you know, give credit to them as well. They hit some big shots but we just didn’t show up until maybe seven minutes left in the game. (Dover Bay) did some good things, but still, there was time to get in the game. We didn’t rebound the ball. We didn’t get back (on defence). All the little things have to go your way once you’re down.”

The simplest of numbers paints the picture: Kelowna scored just nine points in the opening quarter, then put 30 points on the board in the fourth, just four shy of their halftime total of 34.

Dover Bay? With metronomic consistency they delivered 22-22-23-25 over the four quarters.

A BOX SCORE OF WONDER

Break down Dover Bay’s 200 available player minutes (5 starters X 40 potential minutes for each player) and the numbers do more than speak.

Joe Linder played all 40 minutes as is common in all of his team’s big games, scoring 39 points to go along with 14 rebounds, four steals and four assists and only four turnovers.

His back court partner? Fellow Grade 11 Ahmed Eltahhan, who was on the senior varsity roster a season ago but did not get minutes, also played all 40 and had 21 points and eight rebounds. It makes you wonder how a kid that good could not see the floor a season ago, but perhaps speaks more to the quality of seniors on that roster.

Schmidt saw ample playing time last season but was still not positioned at the top end of last season’s rotation. On Friday, he battled fouls the entire way and the 6-foot-6 Grade 11 still scored 21 points and grabbed eight rebounds in 25 minutes.

Landen Ross, a 6-foot-4 forward and only one of two seniors on team, was also rostered last season but didn’t play. He logged 35 minutes and in an important blue-collar role had two points and six rebounds.

Tanner Standerwick, a 6-foot-5 Grade 10 who played on the junior team a season ago, like Ross, lent his presence through similar wingspan-expanding ways, logging 30 minutes with fives points and seven rebounds.

And Grade 10 reserve guard Vaughn Robinson, another JV from a season ago, filled in with six minutes.

And that leaves the most unique member of the Dolphins’ rising group.

Incorrectly listed as a Grade 10 in the official tournament program, 6-foot-6 post Yukun Li is actually a senior who is playing his first season of high school basketball, a kid who could be typecast as a “hallways-recruited student.”

He played 24 minutes and was excellent with four points and five rebounds, including four caroms off the offensive glass.

And there’s your 200 minutes.

It’s a lot to recite, for sure, but Seaman was doing his best with mental gymnastics about five minutes after the win.

Here’s his comments, verbatim, when asked for some origin stories: “Yeah, they were all playing junior. So we have the three Grade 10’s that played up last year. Joe, Ahmed, and Dane. And then we had Landen our Grade 12, the number four. Okay? And then we have the other Grade 12, but he didn’t play last year, with Yukun Li. So we have the four guys and Landon, Dane, and Ahmed never played a lot. And then there was Joe.”

That’s rare, right?

“Yeah, it is,” replied Seaman. “I have to agree with you. I mean, again, it’s the practises, right? We just really put a lot of effort in planning into our practises and to prepare for these types of things.”

You can’t really probe much deeper without sneaking through the gym doors and hiding under the bleachers to truly know what those practices are like, and just how Seaman and assistant Michael Linder put plans together.

Yet those comments are the kinds which truly resonate with our great coaches, the ones who know that simple stuff is only simple until you fully bare soul and evaluate what you are doing from both the most skills-based and holistic entry points.

And yet as Friday night gave way to championship Saturday, the fluidity of the present moment jars you back to reality because the post-mortem of one big game has already begun to figuratively yellow, and in it’s place is the next game, or in this case THE game.

The last one of the entire season.

And no matter how you stare at it, history will be in making.

Later tonight Vancouver College will try and win its first senior boys title in 59 years.

And the Dover Bay Dolphins, with a team young enough to believe 1967 was a time of pterodactyls and big, beefy guys with wooden clubs and sabre-toothed pets, will go out and try to do what they have done all season, and in the process win their first B.C. title at the Quad-A tier.

It will be a rare night and the finish, for whomever triumphs, is guaranteed to be historic.

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