From Nanaimo-Oak Bay 1978 to the hoops madness of 2025: As an epic Vancouver Island 4A tourney tips Thursday, Ken Shields and a cast of others reflect on bookend similarities almost 50 years apart!

LANGLEY — Vancouver Island’s trio of Quad-A senior boys Top 10-ranked basketball teams in this, the 2024-25 season, are the single most dominant such bunch from one top-tiered zone in the entire history of the boys game in B.C.

There… I said it.

Not than anyone ever yells at me any more, but I think I can hear a faint “Hey, Tsumura, that’s a pretty bold statement” off in the distance.

Since we’re talking about forever, it may appear to reek of receny bias, and I’m not going to pretend for a moment that I have every ounce of evidence to back it up.

But I do have this:

Victoria’s Spectrum Thunder and Oak Bay Bays, along with Nanaimo’s Dover Bay Dolphins have a combined league and exhibition record this season of 78-11.

And for the purposes of this article, it’s essential to note that 10 of those 11 losses have come in games the three teams have played against each other.

So simple math tells you that the Thunder, Bays and Dolphins are a combined 78-1 against the rest of the B.C. boys basketball world.

78-1.

I’ll say it again: 78-1!

The only loss, in fact, came just this past Feb. 7 when the host Kelowna Owls beat Oak Bay 82-70 in the semifinals of Kelowna’s own Western Canada Invitational.

With the Vancouver Island Quad-A championships set to tip off this Thursday through Saturday at Dover Bay Secondary, and only two berths to the March 5-8 B.C. championships available, it goes without saying that the tension in this incredible geographic tri-derby will only intensify.

And while I’ve already made my bold claim, I’ll now follow it with a bold fact: Combine the current season with last season (2023-24) and you have the most dominant back-to-back seasons of Vancouver Island top-tiered basketball in almost half of a century. In fact if either of the two survivors from this weekend’s Vancouver Island championships manage to win the B.C. tournament, it will be the first time since the zone has won back-to-back provincial titles since Oak Bay and Nanaimo managed the feat in 1977 and 1978.

All of this is said with respect to the 1991-92 season, which on its own, stands against the very best in Island history. St. Michaels University School, Alberni District and Belmont all made the tourney, and all made the Final 8. SMUS, with senior MVP Steve Nash at the helm, capped a 40-4 campaign in which its only loss with Nash in the line-up came against Trajan Langdon’s East Anchorage squad in a Christmas tournament in Tucson.

Last season, for the first time since 1977-78 season, two Island schools — eventual champion Spectrum and third-place finisher Oak Bay — made the Final Four at the province’s largest classification, while at Triple-A, Dover Bay, in its second straight appearance in the B.C. title game trip, took home the championship.

Next season, three of the key players from this hoops trinity will move on to populate the roster of the Victoria Vikes in what seems like yet another karmic homage to the late-1970s when Vancouver Island high school hoops was king and the early signs of the first true dynasty in Canadian men’s university basketball were just beginning to take seed.

And through the process of talking to some of those fully engaged in its present as well as those whose remembrances give the past its due, the similarities over what amounts to two generations of separation are startling.

In some ways, it’s almost like we’re back in March of 1978 at the Pacific Coliseum and some mop-topped, long-armed kid named Gerald Kazanowski is rearing back and fuelling maybe the deadliest fastbreak offence in provincial boys history with a 65-foot dart of a pass to a speeding teammate for a lay-up.

High school basketball is like that, you know?

And maybe 50 years from now, we’ll be talking the same way about the current state Vancouver Island hoops, the one that in 2024-25 was good.

Real good. 

78-1 good.

HOW HISTORY HAS BROUGHT US TO 2025

There is no better place to begin to trace the origins of the last great run of Vancouver Island top-tiered boys basketball than by taking a trip back to the 1976-77 season.

Coming off a six-year stint as head coach of the Laurentian Voyageurs in Sudbury, Ont., Ken Shields returned to his home province of B.C. in the summer of 1976 to begin what would later become a record-setting runs of seven straight national titles at the helm of the Vikes.

That same year, just north of the provincial capital, John Levering was on the cusp of turning the Nanaimo Islanders into one of the most dominant high school champions that the B.C. boys tournament has seen over its entire 78-year history.

And as Varsity Letters spoke to both men by phone earlier this month, it became very clear that their remembrances of a very special time in Vancouver Island basketball were fuelled by the exceptional rivalry between the Islanders and, of course, Victoria’s Oak Bay Bays, led by another legendary coach, a guy named Don Horwood who would later go on to win three national titles at the helm of Edmonton’s Alberta Golden Bears.

“Oak Bay and Nanaimo were the best teams on the Island,” began Shields, 79, who would recruit, among so many locals — including both Gerald and Greg Kazanowski from the Islanders and Kelly Dukeshire from the Bays — all of whom would go on to form the fabric of the Vikes’ dynasty.

At the 1977 championships, Horwood coached Oak Bay to its third title in five seasons, a 75-64 win over Surrey’s Princess Margaret Lions, making him just the third coach to hit the trifecta of having three B.C. high school boys crowns to his credit.

At the same B.C. tournament, a Nanaimo team just beginning to come into its own, had its title-hopes dashed in the first round of the tournament following a 67-65 loss to the Kelowna Owls, the latter later losing to the Bays in the Final Four.

The next season, however, Nanaimo came into its own with the Brothers Kazanowski (Gerald, Greg and John), along with the likes of guard Mark Spees and forward Paul Davis, capping its championship run with a 71-62 win in the title game over Oak Bay.

Ask Shields about it, however, and what one moment is history shrinking figuratively in the rear-view mirror is quite suddenly re-trenched within a retro world of bell-bottom jeans and overgrown teenage sideburns. As Shields sees it, there are indeed traits in both style and personnel that the present-day Spectrum and Dover Bay (later in this story) teams share with the 1978 champion Nanaimo squad.

“Actually, when I think about it, the Spectrum team has some similarities to that Nanaimo team,” begins Shields, who had first-hand experience with the roster during the 2023-24 season as a regular fixture at practices… kind of like having John Wooden stroll into your high school gym decades after leading UCLA to 10 national titles, and saying ‘OK, today, High-Low Offence’.

“J (swingman J Elijah Helman) is a tough, scrappy player… a really aggressive player,” Shields noted of 6-foot-2 Spectrum senior. “The Kazanowski twins (Greg and John) were also very aggressive.

“And you know, Tyler (Verde)… he’s a Prince Rupert boy,” Shields continued of the Spectrum head coach who played for the same high school team that Shields helped led to a B.C. title in 1964. “So with John Levering and Tyler, they are two very well-coached teams.”

Staying in the present, Verde has turned the Thunder’s roster into a riveting study in versatility.

Helman indeed plays with the abandon of a stuntman, CJ Zuno is a point guard who lately has shown terrific long-range shooting ability, and the likes of 6-foot-4 forward Harkaran Dhah and 5-foot-11 guard Arvin Sidhu have completed three-fifths of the starting line-up behind 6-foot-5 forward Justin Hinrichsen and 6-foot-9 forward/guard/centre Tyler Felt, the latter two each set to play for the crosstown Vikes next season.

But Shields doesn’t just see one Spectrum comparison to the Kazanowski twins. He lauded the grit and tenacity of both Gio de Gracia and Justin Le, last season’s starting senior backcourt, for helping set a standard of excellence that carried over into the current campaign.

Shields calls Hinrichsen and Oak Bay point guard Toren Franklin “the two best (B.C. high school) three-point shooters out there,” and Franklin will join Hinrichsen and Felt on the 2025-26 Vikes as part of head coach Murphy Burnatowski’s incoming class freshmen class.

Then there’s the matter of the two tall-timbered talents.

In the 1978 championship program Gerald Kazanowski, the high school senior and soon-to-be Victoria Vikes’ freshman is listed at 6-foot-6 in the championship program.

In this season’s Terry Fox Legal Beagle Invitational, Tyler Felt, the high school senior and soon-to-be Victoria Vikes freshman, is listed at 6-foot-9.

Honestly, you can call it a wash.

If you were 6-foot-6 with paint skills in 1978, that would probably translate quite nicely to 6-foot-9 or better in 2025, and besides, Kazanowski was listed at 6-foot-9 when he was inducted into the Vikes’ Hall of Fame in 2006 after starting in the front court on four of Shields’ national championship-winning teams. 

“He was unflappable,” said Levering, who at age 77 still carries crisp remembrances of his Gerald Kaz’s play over what was a 46-0 season against Canadian competition in 1977-78.

“He kept his head,” added Levering. “He never got frustrated. He was like a surgeon. And he could throw the long ball. He had an arm on him. He could have been a quarterback. He could lay that pass out from the baseline 60 feetdown the court and be accurate with it.”

In keeping with the evolution of the game, Felt — the 2024 B.C. Quad-A championship MVP — has shown so many dimensions.

“Tyler doesn’t have the same attributes,” explains Shields. “Gerald was more of a true centre in high school, whereas (Felt) plays more on the perimetre.”

Yet their greatest similarity between the Thunder and the ’78 Islanders lies in how their respective coaches have taken the talent afforded them and maximized it to fantastic effect.

We’ll get to the shared traits of the 1978 Nanaimo Islanders and the 2025 Dover Bay Dolphins later in this essay.

But before we switch gears to the present day troika, how about a ties-that-bind connection from Shields’ first days as a university men’s head coach on up 53 years to the present day?

Over the first half of the 1970’s, from 1971-72 through 1974-75, Prince Rupert Secondary grad Shields recruited a kid named Mel Bishop to join him out east in the OUA at Laurentian University.

Shields, of course, returned to B.C. to coach Victoria, and by 1980, Bishop had returned to Rupert where he would begin one of the longest uninterrupted head coaching tenures in B.C. high school boys hoops history, coaching the Rainmakers for 40 seasons and leading them to four provincial titles.

Of course it gets even better.

Over the 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons, Bishop would coach Tyler Verde, clearly instilling in him the same coaching bug that Shields so willingly passed on to him in the early 1970s at Laurentian. 

And if you needed any further proof why it is that high school sports creates the kinds of lifelong bonds that never fray, it was in the moments after the Thunder won the title last year that both Bishop and Shields were each among the first to text their congratulations to Verde.

In a figurative sense, those moments brought new bloom to a coaching tree whose roots have now grown a half-century deep.

THE DEFINITION OF ISLAND-GROWN TALENT

They’d only learned to walk for maybe a couple of months when they first met.

This season, they’re both high school seniors.

On that point alone, it seems they were pre-destined to once again become teammates.

“We’ve been best friends since we were two,” Spectrum forward/centre  Tyler Felt says of his crosstown rival, point guard Toren Franklin of the Oak Bay Bays.

“Same pre-school, different elementary schools, same middle school, different high schools,” Felt continues of his soon-to-be teammate next season with the Vikes.

“I mean… there’s a photos of us. I was two, so I don’t remember too much.”

Justin Hinrichsen, Felt’s Spectrum teammate, is also a part of one of the most ballyhooed single-school recruiting hauls in recent memory.

And when you consider that the trio will be joining the Vikes just as Diego Maffia, the most prolific scorer in program history, is set to graduate, the figurative act of torch passing seems more than merely tacit.

After all, Victoria has truly walked the walk when it’s come to keeping Vancouver Island’s best graduating high school players.

Take a look at Martin Timmerman’s U Sports Hoops website, and you discover that seven of the Vikes’ Top 10 all-time points scorers in regular season league contests are from Vancouver Island high schools, including four from Oak Bay. Two others are from B.C. high schools, while only one is from outside of this province.

Of course, you can’t make that claim without the list:

1 Diego Maffia (Victoria-Oak Bay ’19) 1,703 points

2 Spencer McKay (Oliver-Southern Okanagan ’86) 1,657

3 Eric Hinrichsen (Campbell River-Carihi ’94) 1,586

4 Greg Meldrum (West Vancouver ’94) 1,411

5 Ryan MacKinnon (Comox-Parkland ‘07) 1,366

6 Chris Trumpy (Victoria-Oak Bay ’00) 1,361

7 Tom Johnson (Saanich-Parkland ’86) 1.355

8 Scott Kellum (Issaquah, WA ’16) 1,287

9 Ali Wilmott (Victoria-Oak Bay ’94) 1,176

10 Robbie Parris (Victoria-Oak Bay ’74) 1,119

Are the incoming three talented enough to crack that list?

The answer is a resounding ‘yes’, yet in the final analysis, all such matters are best left to the organic process of the basketball gods.

What style will this team discover it is best-suited to play? That’s the more important question. After all, the defensive-minded Vikes teams of the Shields’ era have only three players in this top 10 (Parris, McKay and Johnson) and of that trio Parris was a holdover when Shields took command prior to the 1976-77 season.

And it is only a matter of time before the NCAA transfer portal begins to fully leave its mark on rosters throughout U SPORTS.

What’s the history of the Vikes’ three 2025 recruits?

Bays’ head coach Chris Franklin, asked to trace the trio’s origin story, rattles off a rapid-fire string of names of which “Justin, Toren, Tyler,” are included.

“My brother Don started them all off with Bay Nation (club basketball) when they were really little,” said coach Franklin, who just happens to be Toren Franklin’s uncle. “It really centred around Toren and Tyler Felt,” he added. “Don wanted to get the kids into hoops, and so he helped me when they were really young. Then I handed them off to some really good coaches (at Bay Nation) like Chris Marsh and Geoff Pippus. I got them back about three years ago, and they’ve been a pleasure to work with because they are excited about sports, about being together, and about getting better. It’s been good.”

What makes them a perfect trio is their ability to compliment each other on the floor from point guard (Franklin) to swing man (Hinrichsen) to forward/centre (Felt).

Each, especially Felt, is continuing to morph into a broader multi-position talent, and that feature, in addition to their overall stature as three of the very best players in the Class of ’25 makes them, as a collective, about as big a high school hoops news story as the B.C. boys have produced in recent memory.

So how did they all end up committing to the Vikes?

“I was the first one to commit, so I did a lot of convincing them to come,” Franklin said earlier this year during the Terry Fox Legal Beagle invitational in Port Coquitlam in early January. “I was texting (Felt and Hinrichsen) every day to come.

“We want to bring a national championship back to Victoria,” continued Franklin, something the current edition of the Vikes are aiming to do coming off a 20-0 Canada West regular season, a little over half of it without the services of Maffia who has been forced to sit out with an injury.

“For all three of us, that is our goal and staying together is also a big piece, being at a place where we could all play together.”

The Vikes have not won the national title in 28 years.

That’s how long it has been since the late Guy Vetrie, another player Shields coached over his tenure at Laurentian, guided a Victoria team including Hinrichsen, Wilmott and Alberni District’s Pat Cannon to an 84-73 win over McMaster in the 1997 final at Halifax.

It’s almost become a cliche for coaches to say that they need to keep their homegrown talent at home, but with the Vikes it has been anything but mere lip service.

“First off, Craig Beaucamp deserves a lot of credit for the program he built and what he left behind,” said Chris Franklin of the program’s former 21-year head coach, who back in 2006 took the Vikes all the way to the national final before suffering a 73-67 loss to Ottawa’s Carleton Ravens. “Murphy has taken it over now and obviously, he made a great connection with Toren, Justin and Tyler as his early commits.

“It’s great going out there, and when you watch UVic play, there are four Island kids starting in Shadynn (Smid from Quw’utsun, formerly Cowichan), Griff (Arnatt) and Diego from Oak Bay and Ethan Boag from Claremont,” Franklin continued back in early January when Maffia was still healthy.

“So if you’re a little kid playing at halftime, you’re not looking at an arbitrary kid from Ontario. You’re looking at a kid who grew up three blocks from you. And that is wonderful that kids can see that, aspire to that.”

Adds Justin Hinrichsen who will carry on a father-son legacy when he joins dad Eric, the leading rebounder and third-leading scorer in program history, in donning Vikes colours next season: “I hope we can inspire the younger generation. We have coached a lot of the young kids already, so they know lots of us. If we win games, win nationals, it will inspire them to keep working. All that builds community around your university.”

ON FITNESS, FUN AND FAST BREAKS!

The provincial capital’s basketball history has certainly played itself out on a much grander national and provincial stage than that of the Hub City.

Yet Nanaimo basketball, infused with equal measures of blue-collar grit and underdog pride, has always its own sense of self, with its per capita history matching any city in the province.

So how special it has been to see Dover Bay, top-tiered B.C. champs in 2007 under head coach Mark Simpson, and 2024 Triple-A champs under current head coach Darren Seaman, battling both Spectrum and Oak Bay in the run up to the Vancouver Island championships?

Again, it’s been in everything outside of the trio’s 78-1 record against the rest of B.C. that has made this a generational treat.

Each of the three teams has beaten the other two at least once this season.

In Dover’s case, they beat Oak Bay 83-79 in the Heritage Woods tourney final the first weekend of the season back in late November, but then fell 95-89 to the Bays last month in Vancouver College’s Emerald final.

The Dolphins are 1-2 against Spectrum, losing to them 91-62 in a Dec. 30 game at home, then losing again a few weeks later at Spectrum by a 79-67 count. In their most recent meeting, Dover Bay beat Spectrum 82-79 in the semifinals of the Emerald.

To complete the picture: Spectrum is 6-2 overall against the other two with a 4-1 mark against Oak Bay and a 2-1 record against Dover Bay. By virtue of all of that, Oak Bay is 2-5 overall, including 1-4 against Spectrum and 1-1 vs. Dover Bay.

And while the Felt-Hinrichsen-Franklin trio is UVic-bound, the other player who has continually been in the same discussion when it comes to not only the Island’s best, but B.C.’s best, it’s Frank Linder, the Dolphins’ 6-foot-7 all-everything senior standout who will suit up for the UBC Thunderbirds next season.

Following in the footsteps of older brother Luke, who helped lead the Dolphins to a Triple-A title game loss to St. Patrick’s back in 2023, Frank Linder is coming off a B.C. title win and tournament MVP honours last season.

He’s also playing on a team that includes his talented Grade 10 brother, point guard Joe Linder. And let’s not forget that there is a Grade 6 brother named Eric and Grade 4 brother named Nicholas all taking early steps through their formative years in the game. That’s five boys!

It’s a litter of Linders so large you’re liable to lose count. Plus, there’s Grade 8 sister Beth, too.

“Dover Bay… they have that family of good players,” Ken Shields says as he’s asked to cast his gaze north up the Island Highway to a place where basketball brothers still rule the roost.

“I think there’s three of them,” he chuckles. “Three of them, or four? It’s kind of like the Kazanowskis.”

There’s also a level of toughness and conditioning that has become the base of everything they do, all coming from its head coach Seaman, a former ultra-marathon runner.

And it’s all of that which puts the Dolphins in clear lock-step with the 1978 Nanaimo Islanders.

Ask coach Levering about the will and the spirit his ’78 Isles took into their soon-to-be championship season, and there is no questioning the DNA these two clubs share almost 50 years later.

A year previous, in the 1977 championships in which Horwood’s Bays were clearly at the top of their game en route to the B.C. title, the Island No. 2 Islanders suffered their aforementioned 67-75 Round 1 loss to Kelowna. Nothing was quite the same after that.

“We lost that first game the year before,” remembers Levering, “and we felt that it was from a call that maybe shouldn’t have happened. So we adopted a philosophy that no way was a referee ever going to have a chance to take a game out of our hands again.

“We met as a team. We set standards and if you wanted to try out for (next season’s) team, and this was right after spring break, you had to run eight laps of the track in under 13 minutes… and I never had a kid that couldn’t do it.”

That’s just under two miles… and absolutely no walk in the park unless you are a dedicated middle-distance runner.

The guards, of course were quicker, but Levering says even the taller kids were “…coming in at around 12:35, that kind of thing.”

Omnipresent were the steps behind the school, a cruel ascent at pace up to what was then Malaspina College and is now known as Vancouver Island University.

And there was also a two-level circuit training course underneath one of the stages at the school which utilized light weights and high repetition.

“The kids ran that faithfully,” added Levering, a 1967 NDSS grad who over the course of his high school career had his own mortality as player tested by guarding one of the greatest ever to play the game in B.C., Billy Robinson of Chemainus, who would later go on to distinguish himself with the Canadian national team.

To that end, the current era of Dolphins are a chip off the old block.

“Dover Bay is, I would probably say, the hardest working group in B.C. in terms of physical training, that sort of thing,” said Bays head coach Chris Franklin, who was the assistant coach under Simpson on the 2007 Dover Bay championship team which inlcuded the likes of Greg Gillies and 6-foot-7 MVP Pat McCarthy. “I think they are in superb shape.”

Last March, after winning the school’s second-ever senior boys provincial varsity title, Seaman told me “…it’s the fitness. Fitness. We put fitness at the top. We play fast in practice. We run. We do all kinds of stuff to keep our guys fit. And I am a fitness guy… from ultramarathons.”

Levering has since set up roots in the Okanagan and this season is co-coaching the Vernon Panthers Grade 9 boys team with former Vancouver College senior boys head coach Bob Corbett.

But his heart is still anchored in the harbour of his hometown, and still beats quickest when the topic turns to the 1978 Islanders — 46-0 against Canadian competition that season — and their ability to play run-and-gun basketball at a level that was clearly ahead of its time and which has helped seal their place in the annals of provincial boys hoop history.

Back in 2020, as part of the 75th anniversary celebrations for the boys championships, VarsityLetters.ca hosted a 64-team fantasy draw.

And as the Islanders advanced all the way to the championship, a pair of veteran coaches, still active today, provided first-hand remembrances of just how pioneering their style was.

“Whenever you scored on them, Gerald was throwing it to one of his brothers and they scored right back on you in seconds,” said Rich Chambers, who faced the ’78 vintage Nanaimo team while coaching Coquitlam’s Centennial Centaurs. “They were running the uptempo super fast-break way before anyone else.”

Ken Dockendorf, who faced the same Nanaimo team during his extended run as head coach at Maple Ridge added: “Nanaimo was ahead of their time with how they pressed and ran their fast break. They truly were a forerunner to the new style of play with more intense pressure and scoring in transition.”

Somehow, 47 years have passed since that season, and yet the simple act of celebrating a myriad of commonalities can make it all seem like yesterday.

And so now we simply await the best atmosphere that B.C. high school basketball can bring when Dover Bay hosts the Vancouver Island Quad-A championships Thursday through Saturday.

The true meaning of 78-1?

When you get right down to it, it’s just more grist for the mill in the telling of Victoria’s amazing basketball history.

“Gosh, the Island has a rich history in basketball,” begins Oak Bay coach Franklin, just moments before the Bays and Thunder prepared to play their respective semifinal games at the Legal Beagle. “And I’d say that every one of those (Oak Bay and Spectrum) kids has been in front of Ken Shields at least once in their lifetime. That background? That history? The kids are lucky for it.”

(Many thanks to the coaches and players who spoke to Varsity Letters for this story, as well as University of Victoria sports information coordinator Alexis Chevalier for vintage photos, and to Martin Timmerman, whose USportsHoops.ca website is the information source that allows journalists to write with unbridled confidence about the history and the impact of Canadian university basketball)

If you’re reading this story or viewing these photos on any website other than one belonging to a university athletic department, it has been taken without appropriate permission. In these challenging times, true journalism will survive only through your dedicated support and loyalty. VarsityLetters.ca and all of its exclusive content has been created to serve B.C.’s high school and university sports community with hard work, integrity and respect. Feel free to drop us a line any time at howardtsumura@gmail.com.