By HOWARD TSUMURA
(Varsity Letters)
(The first of a two-part series which concludes Tuesday, March 4)
LANGLEY — In the first week of the new year, I took out my notepad and my voice recorder and I started to interview a lot of the acquaintances I have made over what has been a lifetime spent within our province’s basketball world.
For too long, I had had what I can only call an eternal question.
It wasn’t quite as deep as seeking the meaning of life, but within the borders of both our beautiful game and province, it was pretty darn close.
It went something like this: “Do you know what year the three-point shot started in B.C. high school basketball?”
Pretty simple, especially considering that if you’re an older hoop head like myself, you had personally lived through its era of introduction.
The young’uns?
No disrepect intended, but yes, like the wheel and the Kraft Dinner, there was a time when just such things did not exist.
Yet in ways that your 61-year-old authour could never have imagined, probing into the origins of the three-point shot as it pertained to our high school basketball world was filled with mystery.
Only one person I asked personally knew the answer… definitively.
Of course, I know there are many, many others.
Yet unless you were playing high school basketball within perhaps a year or two on either side of its origins, you probably just accepted what was the status quo. It’s a lesson in just how easy it is to lose history in the years leading up the widespread introduction of the internet.
For me, it was only after beginning discussions with the caretaker of the B.C. boys game — Ken Winslade — that the trail got hot enough to make the stamp official.
And to my amazement, there was some serendipity involved.
How cool was it to learn that this 2024-25 season, one set to conclude with the provincial championships Wednesday through Saturday at the LEC, just happens to be the 40th anniversary of the three-point shot’s introduction to B.C. boys high school basketball!
Yes, the 1984-85 season — one which had perhaps the greatest NBA rookie class of all time with Michael Jordan, John Stockton, Hakeem Olajuwon and Charles Barkley — was the also the first to feature the long-line in high school gyms across our province.
Trying to get verification on the first season of the three-point shot for B.C. girls high school basketball has been another story, and unfortunately, with your author’s involvement in the three weeks of provincial basketball championships, the time has not been available to be as dogged as I’d have liked.
(The best part? I am pretty sure someone in our loyal audience knows, and if you do, please email me at howardtsumura@gmail.com so that I might in the near future be able to add to this story. Important to note that it can’t just be a hunch. All submissions are welcome)
Another strange fact discovered along the trail?
The CIAU, later CIS and today U SPORTS, didn’t adopt the three-point shot until a full two seasons after the B.C. high school boys, introducing it in 1986-87 for both men and women.
Irregardless, with the 79th edition of the provincial senior boys championships set to tip off March 5-8 at the LEC, the most fascinating aspect of this story is the near-absolute anonymity under which it was born, and the near-frigid reception it received back then from coaches around the province.
All of this, of course, is magnified in present times by the singular grip the shot has come to hold on even those young enough to have not even entered the game’s vast delivery systems.
(Writer’s note — Any reference from this point forward regarding the three-point shot refers specifically to its place in B.C. boys high school basketball)
HOT ON THE TRAIL OF THE TRIPLE!, THE TREY!, THE TRIFECTA!
Given the three-point shot’s landmark birthday, it feels like each 19-foot-9 shot hoisted this season has that little extra bit of karma on its side.
Back on the last Saturday in November, I drove out to Port Moody for the final day of the Heritage Woods’ Kodiak Classic invitational.
These would be my first in-person games of the newly-christened campaign and at that time I was still unaware of what season the three had even been introduced.
With so many of the province’s best teams taking part, paramount in my thoughts was one question: Was there perhaps an over-riding theme set to emerge on this day? Perhaps one that might potentially speak to the changing tide of play in our game?
So what did I wind up seeing?
In the first game I watched, the fifth-place final between East Vancouver’s St. Patrick Celtics and Surrey’s Semiahmoo Thunderbirds, I watched the Celts come away with a 74-67 win which featured 16 three-point makes, or 65 per cent of the team’s offence.
And in the third-place game that followed, I saw Vancouver College top Kelowna 89-68 in what remains the best three-point shooting display I have seen this season.
Off the opening tip, the Irish hit on their first four shot attempts, all from three-point range. They then replicated the feat to open the second half, with those four treys falling over a span of just 90 seconds.
On the game, Vancouver College hit 17 threes.
Umm, basketball gods, yeah… about that singular theme? Got the message. Loud and clear.
And thus with St. Pat’s and Vancouver College having combined for 30 triples in those two games, I set about talking to a cross-section of coaches all about the shot that for so many, has always seemed to just be there.
THREE-POINTERS NOT ALLOWED!
Chatting with coaches and ex-players for as long as I did for this story, your radar begins to hone in, waiting for that rare quote which would be able to capture just how untested and how unsafe the three-point shot felt when it first got the green light back in the fall of 1984.
Jason Winslade was a senior guard with Coquitlam’s Centennial Centaurs that season, and 6-footer with the range to hit from beyond the new arc.
These days, he is General Manager of Municipal Administration, Facilities and Corporate Projects for the Township of Langley, as well as serving as Chair of the LEC Organizing Committees for the Girls and Boys BCSS High School Basketball Championships.
Like his dad Ken, Jason is also one of B.C. high school basketball’s true caretakers.
As Winslade and I were finishing up a phone call one day, I mentioned to him that I was working on this story, not realizing at the time that his senior year of high school coincided with the first year of the three-point shot in B.C. high schools.
“It really didn’t seem like that big of a deal, actually,” he began of the introduction of the shot.
A keen fan of all levels of the game throughout his life, Winslade had watched from afar as first the NBA and later the NCAA adopted the ‘new’ longer shot on a trial basis.
“(But) it clearly wasn’t going to be introduced as a strategy for our ’85 Centennial team,” he added very quickly.
The top-tiered 1985 B.C. boys championship that March saw Richmond defeat Centennial 74-61 in a game which featured a pair of legendary head coaches doing battle in the Colts’ Bill Disbrow and the Centaurs’ Rich Chambers.
It was a game that did not produce a single three-point basket.
“We still laugh about it now 40 years later,” Winslade continued. “Mr. Chambers wouldn’t let us shoot a three-pointer. None.”
It was a rule in which you could expect no quarter to be given, so much so that Winslade comically remembers the extent to which he went to not raise the ire of the fiery head coach.
“My role was to shoot, especially against zone defences, point guards, mostly top of the key, but not threes,” he said.
“One game, in Centennial’s old gym, I’d made a number of shots in a row from the outside, against a zone, but they were all twos, my foot just over the line.
“Coming out of a time out, I was in-boudning the ball, there was a bit of a delay, and the ref, who was always quick to give (Chambers) a technical says to me ‘You know if you just slid your foot back an inch, all of those would be three-pointers? I said ‘You know what would happen if I slid my foot back an inch? I’m on the bench.’ We had a good laugh.”
Chambers is still coaching senior boys basketball in the Tri-Cities, and on Wednesday he will be at the helm once more when PoCo’s Terry Fox Ravens face the Semiahmoo Totems in a 1:15 pm B.C. championship Quad-A opener on.
THE DRAMA OF THE LONG BALL
Hindsight being 20/20, it might seem to today’s younger members of the B.C. hoops community simply incredible that the introduction of such a significant new rule wouldn’t have been greeted with open arms.
Yet to place things in a proper context, it is important to remember that a number of substantial rule changes had been introduced within the same mid-1980s era at the high school level here in B.C., enough that when the three-point line was introduced it was looked at as just another strategic weapon that needed to be allowed its due incubation time.
In time, within that era, some of the rules that were phased out included:
*If fouled while shooting, you were given three shots to make two.
*In bonus, you could either shoot or take the ball on the sideline.
*Referees didn’t have to first touch the ball on an out-of-bounds in the defensive end.
Ken Dockendorf, who for a generation plus led the Maple Ridge Ramblers and continues to coach at the senior varsity level, this season at Coquitlam’s Gleneagle Secondary, remembers not only how little the shot was used in its second season of existence, but also the drama the shot could bring — make or miss — on the game’s highest high school stage.
By the time the three pointer’s second season (1985-86) rolled around, it remained the red-headed stepchild.
In fact you could trace the first real three-point attempt of any significant magnitude to the provincials staged in March of 1986 at the PNE Agrodome.
Back in those days, Dockendorf’s extended run at the helm of the Maple Ridge Ramblers was just beginning, and that season he led his team past star guard J.D. Jackson and the Vernon Panthers 77-71 in the championship game.
What is largely forgotten, today, however, was a three-point shot attempt attempted the night before in the B.C. semifinals.
“We were up (by two) against Kelowna, with all of those good players they had (Al Lalonde, Mike Clarke), and there was about 10 seconds left in the game,” Dockendorf remembered.
“This guy, a good guard that they had, went up right in front of me,” said the coach, re-living the scene from his spot courtside. “Swish. He made it. For three. And then the ref said ‘No’. He hit the line. His toe hit the line. So we got a reprieve. We went to overtime and we won (the B.C. title 68-65). Otherwise, we would have lost. I think Kelowna had been No. 1 all year. But his foot touched the line.”
That night, what you take for granted in so many game-on-the line situations happened for the first time in B.C. The three-point shot showed its true power, its potential and its penchant for the dramatic.
It’s evolution since?
It’s tough to say that you’ll ever gain a true consensus, but the general majority seem to appreciate it more when it evolves as one option in a more balanced offence… not the only option as it may so often seem.
Maybe the best way to describe it is to say that it’s been kind of like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, then not knowing how best to use its substantial powers.
“…WHEN THE 3-POINTER FIRST CAME IN IT HAPPENED MORE ORGANICALLY”
Should we just blame the NBA?
Back on Dec. 13 of this season, the Chicago Bulls and the Charlotte Hornets combined to miss 75 three-pointers in a single game, a new league record for long-range futility in a regulation game.
The Bulls went 14-of-51 from three-point range, and the Hornets 8-of-46 in a game Chicago won 109-95 at home.
Really, 8-of-46?
That’s 17.4 percent on 46 attempts, almost half of Charlotte’s 98 field goal attempts on the night.
It’s a fact that the NBA’s television ratings are dropping, perhaps not as much as the 25 per cent that had been reported earlier this season. But it has been dropping.
And that is despite all of the great theatre it is still capable of producing with the top .01 percentile of the world’s most skilled players.
Ask fans, players and coaches across the spectrum and at every level, and I suspect the synthesis of their response, if it was to trend in the middle but still more negative than positive, would centre around what they would perceive to be an overly-homogenized product.
“It was better when the three-pointer first came in because it happened more organically and it wasn’t so much the plan,” says Bill Disbrow, the former Richmond Colts head coach who has won more top-tiered boys championship titles than anyone in B.C. history.
“But I still get excited when guys make threes,” he continued. “It’s a big deal. It’s not easy and (the players) are so damn good at it. But I don’t think the game is as exciting. Especially the NBA.
“I have lost a lot of interest, although my favourite player is Steph so I can’t be too definitive about how much I hate it,” Disbrow chuckles of the game’s greatest pure shooter, who is of course Golden State’s Stephen Curry.
Canadian coaching legend Ken Shields, who led Victoria to seven straight national titles, understands fully the place the three-point shot has in today’s global game.
He’s not blowing the horn for more three-point shooting, but he is giving the shot its due, as long as its usage and its technical delivery are deployed with integrity.
“The three-point shot is for elite players who can shoot it at 35 per cent (or better),” Shields explained. “How many guys are just bombing threes, shooting under 30 per cent, shooting early in the shot clock… come on, that’s like suicide.”
Shields drives home the fact that ignoring textbook form and not putting in competitive, daily reps can lead to disaster.
“Carleton led Canada in three-point shooting when (Dave) Smart was there, and they did not shoot them off the dribble” Shields continues of the dynastic head coach who has since moved on to the NCAA Div. 1 ranks with the Pacific Tigers, where one of his top assistants is former longtime Victoria head coach Craig Beaucamp.
“They only shot catch-and-shoot threes. Carleton, as they went from one phase of a drill to another, they’d take a little break inbetween and shoot threes, and they kept score. I believe that you have to make a standard, You have to earn your right to shoot them in games. It’s not just random.
“If you watch Steph, how many off-balance shots do you see him take? How many rushed shots? He can get the ball off in .4 seconds. Those little things are huge. Plus, he started in the gym with the Raptors with his dad (Dell Curry).”
From the B.C. high school coaching ranks, King George Dragons’ head coach Darko Kulic isn’t afraid to profess a love of an older school of the game, one that is quick to stress balance and overall fundamental development of youth players.
“My big thing is that I don’t like it when you go out, out, out rather than gap, kick, swing. (These days) it’s less ball movement and more iso (isolation) ball. So more and more kids are not learning to play with proper moving, cutting, screening, sealing. You know?
Shields agrees.
“People will say you’re old-fashioned,” he begins. “No. I am not. I am going to get open three-point shots by making the defence have a difficult time, and when you put a team in rotation, it’s difficult to defend if you space your players properly.”
So where’s the place to go if you want to get back to watching just how great NBA basketball was at the turn of the century and back towards the mid-1980s?
The consensus is in.
“You watch EuroLeague and it looks similar to what it used to be,” said Oak Bay senior boys head coach Chris Franklin, who has one of the province’s very best long-range shooters in his nephew Toren Franklin. “It has posting up. It has internal play because there’s not as much space to be had.
Shields enjoys watching Oklahoma City games, but also casts an eye globally.
“I love watching OKC, I love the way they play and their absolute commitment to team basketball on offence. And I love watching Shai (Gilgeous-Alexander). But I don’t watch much NBA.
“I like watching EuroLeauge games,” adds Shields, whose close friend Gordie Herbert, a Penticton Secondary grad, who is head coach of Bayern Munich and who coached the German national team to gold at the 2023 FIBA World Cup. “There’s team play, and they run different defences and offences with elite players and great coaches.”
NO THREE-POINT SHOOTING FOR A MONTH! CHAOS?
It was back in early December, during my annual Tsumura Basketball Invitational tournament at the Langley Events Centre, that I became engaged in a terrific on-air commentary with analyst Jamie Oei, an assistant coach with the CIS Final 8-bound UBC Thunderbirds, and the head coach of the boys JV team at North Vancouver’s Argyle Secondary who finished second at last month’s B.C. championships.
At one point, Oei posed the question: “What would happen if B.C. high school kids couldn’t shoot the three for a full month?
Jamie’s question was such a good one that as I began research for this story, I threw it out to many of the people I interviewed.
Some of the samples:
DARKO KULIC (King George senior boys coach)
I don’t mind threes. I don’t agree fully with the way the game has gone with settling for it. I like attacking the rim. I like the post-up. Our team always shoots threes, but it comes inside-out. We never settle. Interestingly enough, I think it would be an easier adjustment for us because our team is so used to cutting, moving and passing and working together. The first week would be a shock, the second would be ‘How do we adjust?’ and by weeks three and four, we would get our beautiful game back. And I am saying it in a positive way. If you brought it back then, I almost feel that it would be what we as coaches want, which is the median. I’ve always believe in the grey area of it.
ALLISON MCNEILL (Canadian senior women, Oregon, Semiahmoo, Seaquam): I’d like to see kids exploring getting to the rim a bit more, but under control, and also I’d like to see them explore posting up. I am seeing teams shooting way too many threes for their ability, but that is the game now. I love the three-point line. I would never want to go back. I’d like to see a bit more balance in high school. Use your post kids now and then, run a kid to the front of the rim, put pressure on the rim. I still think there’s some great things about basketball that we can’t ignore just because a three is worth three. But I think if you said for a month you couldn’t do it, it might improve ball handling and passing.
NAP SANTOS (St. Patricks senior boy coach)
I would love that. For someone that is a three-point shooter like myself — I can shoot with the best of them — my guys are always challenging me, but they are not as good midrange shooters as they are three point-shooters. So we practice midrange. I’ll shoot with them. I’ll say ‘Look, I can go 10 in row midrange shot from the elbows. You guys have to learn that. That’s a normal shot. Get someone setting a pick, get to the elbow… now they will get up on you, now you can do your layup. There are so many things you can do from a midrange shot, I love the midrange shot.
CHRIS FRANKLIN (Oak Bay senior boys head coach)
A week, it would be chaos. If it was a month then we’d see the return of the power game, the high post, or three out-two in. But a week? A week would be utter chaos and Spectrum would dominate.
KEN DOCKENDORF (Gleneagle senior boys head coach)
“It’s a real challenge to get them not to shoot threes. I’m at Gleneagle and we’re not shooting threes because we can’t make threes.”
WHAT’S THE FUTURE
There have been so many salient points brought forward by our panel of experts today.
Yet it is so tough to read the tea leaves and predict where the three-point movement is headed.
The European influence has been huge, and its version of a more complete all-round player has certainly resonated with an ever-growing mass of coaches and players.
And the over-saturation of the three-point shot as it pertains to the NBA has, in one respect, served as a starting point for more discussion and input.
The famed cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, speaking in much broader societal terms is famously quoted as saying “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
On a micro-scale, evolution within the sport of basketball is also a fluid process, and who knows what awaits those of us involved in the daily machinations of the B.C. high school game?
Our veteran coaches, like Allison McNeill and Ken Shields can appreciate all the merits of the three-point shot if, and it’s a crucial if, coaches and players teach it from the standpoint of not only technique, but how it and so many other basic staples of offence are allowed to play off of each other.
And under those conditions, it indeed makes a beautiful game even better.
A NEW ADDITION
Our thanks to Coach Ebe, Paul Eberhardt, for reading this story and sending along the winners of the three-point shooting contest (along with the slam dunk winners). Click on the link below to view!
TOMORROW: Forty years later, we meet the first player to ever hit a three-pointer at the B.C. high school championship tournament!
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.
