LANGLEY — In keeping with its date of publication, the hue of its newsprint has begun its fade to yellow.
Yet like a perfectly-launched fadeaway jumper, the feeling you get re-reading a pair of articles from the March 8, 1994 edition of The Province newspaper, some 31 years later, seems the same as hitting nothing but net.
The topic that day?
Where do you see B.C. girls high school basketball headed in 20 years time?
Admittedly we’re just over a decade late in our follow up, yet with the girls provincial tournament set to celebrate its 75th anniversary later this month, you could also say that the timing couldn’t be any better.
Under one of the headlines, which read ‘The sky’s the limit for dreaming… huge hopes for new site’, three pivotal figures of the day within the girls high school hoops community looked with excitement to the future.
After about a quarter-century of near-exclusive play in various high school gyms around the province, the showcase for the girls high school game had outgrown a few simple sets of bleachers.
And thus Allison McNeill, Mike Hind and the late Cindy Thompson all looked ahead as B.C.’s top-tiered tournament announced that it had signed a two-year deal, starting in March of 1994, to play its provincial championship tournament at North Vancouver’s Capilano College SportsPlex.
That initial two-year deal, brokered by Hind, then Basketball B.C.’s technical director, proved to be such a success that the girls wound up staying for 19 years.
Like every move, it faced pockets of criticism in its day, just as the tourney’s most recent relocation did 12 years ago to its present home at the Langley Events Centre.
Yet as the madness of March beckons once again, this time on the occasion of a 75th anniversary in which major change is once again thick in the air, all of the caretakers of B.C. girls high school basketball can take solace in one indisputable fact: By trusting their collective gut they have shepherded their championship game to the point where it can now dance in style on the first day of March.
Since its first season at the Langley Events Centre in 2013, its return from a pandemic-cancelled 2021, to a 2024 championship which finally united all four tiers of competition under the grand LEC umbrella, tradition has become embedded in what must now surely be its generational home.
And in light of all of that, it seems especially apropos to re-visit not only a landmark newspaper article from three decades ago, but from it to exhume all of its hopes and fears within the framework of 2025 and beyond.
THE FUTURE IS NOW
Mike Hind has coached at a lot of different places, managed things from the administrative side of the game, and to this day, continues to volunteer his time at the provincial championships.
And when your author posed the question to him back in March of 1994 regarding the best road for the girls championships to traverse over the next two decades, he didn’t hold back.
“We’re at Capilano College this year and that’s a big step,” he began. “But in 20 years, I’d like to see us playing the finals in somewhere like B.C. Place.
“I’d like to see the boys and girls finals being played there on two separate courts. You could move portable bleachers in there and on the Friday, have two Final Fours going on. That would be a basketball love-fest.”
That’s precisely what was happening with our neighbours south of the line in Washington.
And to take things a step further, there was McNeill who went so far as to actually turn her crystal ball gazing into reality.
“Twenty years?” she began, taking a deep breath. “What would I like to see. By that time I’d like to see a permanent basketball facility in the area. ”
Of course, she went on to add that it would be a multi-court facility, and severe as a training centre for provincial teams as well as host the boys and girls provincial championships.
If that was considered at the time to be shooting for the moon, 30-plus years later, based on the what is now become eight tiers and 128 combined teams in back-to-back B.C. senior girls and then boys championship tournaments at the LEC, albeit on back-to-back weeks, and the home of Basketball B.C. and its myriad provincial programs and teams, that statement is flat-out visionary.
Thompson made a point of stating that day in 1994 that parity needed to one day become a reality, and she’ll be smiling come March 1 when the girls all four of their finals under the ‘big tent’ of the Arena Bowl.
And with packed crowds and eight days of senior varsity tourney play over a 10-day span, it has indeed become the kind of basketball love-fest that Hind had hinted at.
Every other province can only look with envy at the crowds and the mass popularity of the B.C. high school basketball championships, and the reason the game’s naysayers have been consistently proven wrong with their death-knell prophecies is that a core of people in this province give freely of their time to promote the holistic elements so intrinsic in what we can rightly call “our” game: Playing the game with your classmates, celebrating that bond and the pull it has to bring you back as a coach, and against all odds, keep the circle turning.
And back to tracing the growth of the girls game in B.C. as it pertains to the site of its championship games, it is essential to remember that the Double-A tier found a permanent home in Kamloops in 1999 before arriving at the Langley Events Centre in 2014.
If under-rated or even forgotten today, those 15 years in Kamloops — which utilized a number of different venues including the Tournament Capital Centre — were something of a forefather to the LEC model.
A subsequent addition, made within the present LEC-hosting era, was the addition in 2020 of a fourth class, known as the ‘newly-created’ Triple-A tier.
That left the newly-minted Quad-A tier to represent the highest tier of competition in any given year since the first year of B.C. girls high school basketball provincial championship play in 1948.
And these days, looking back in retrospect, the near two-decade stay of the top-tiered championship at Capilano was the perfect stepping stone to next hop, step and jump to the Township of Langley.
“I think it had to leave the high schools, and Cap (now Capilano University) was the perfect venue at the time,” said McNeill, whose highlights over a lifetime in the game include suiting up for the Oregon Ducks and coaching the Canadian women to the quarter-finals of the 2012 London Olympics.
Added Hind: “Its time was right to go from a high school gym where you might be able to put 800 people in there to a place where you were shoe-horning 2,000 people.”
“But when it started to fill up and then sell-out, I started thinking ‘Man, it’s got to go bigger,’” continued McNeill. “Then the LEC took over and it’s become the place to be for basketball. It’s the hub and the whole basketball community comes together.
“I think it was vital. I don’t know where our game would be if we had stayed in the high schools.”
For her part, McNeill won B.C. championships as a player with Salmon Arm Jewels in the gyms at Penticton High and East Vancouver’s Sir Charles Tupper Secondary.
Nothing can ever minimize those thrills because the experience remains larger than life to her and the hundreds of others who won B.C. championships in the same-sized gymnasiums we all took our P.E. classes in.
Yet to sees such an upward trajectory of optimism from the current fan base, despite all the doom and gloom which many feel envelopes the girls game, is reason to hold out hope for not only its survival, but for its continued growth.
And so in some way, 75 candles must be lit on March 1 as the B.C. senior girls championship finals, all four of them, are given their grandest stage yet in the LEC’s cavernous 7,000-seat Arena Bowl.
“IF WE DON’T TAKE THE LEAP, HOW ARE WE GOING TO KNOW?”
Back in the offseason prior to the 2010-11 B.C. senior boys basketball season, a number of opinions were expressed in terms of the big mistake that was being made in moving its top-tiered tournament (Triple-A at the time) from the PNE Agrodome to the freshly-minted Langley Events Centre.
“They told us we wouldn’t be able to make this thing work, and here we are 14 years later… we’ve literally the last two years had to lock the doors due to fire rules,” begins Bobby Braich, a B.C. high school basketball lifer, who along with his three brothers Herman, Jim and Ken, all played in the B.C. championship tournament for Mission Secondary.
These days, Braich is the head coach of Abbotsford’s Yale Lions senior girls team, and he has been the guiding force behind the movement to take the B.C. girls championship finals into the LEC’s Arena Bowl, which has been a complete sellout of 7,000-plus fans for its Championship Saturday finals the past two seasons.
“Now, for the girls at (the LEC’s) Centre Court (another sell-out at 2,200 fans), we’re bursting at the seams,” Braich continued.
All of which brings us to the elephant in the Arena Bowl: What if the girls finals don’t sell out?
Leave it to McNeill to provide the perfect answer.
“I think you’ve got to take the leap… at some point, you’ve got to take the leap,” she states with aplomb.
“If we don’t take the leap, how are we going to know? We just can’t continue to say ‘We might not fill it.’ Well, we might not. That’s a reality for sure. But I think it’ll be great even if it isn’t (sold out) because it’ll be the right thing to do.”
And when it comes to speaking on behalf of the path high school girls basketball in this province has needed to follow, McNeill is as credentialed as they come.
After finishing her collegiate career with the Oregon Ducks 1980-81 with Salmon Arm teammate Bev Smith, McNeill returned as an assistant coach in 1981-82, helping lead Oregon to a berth in what was the first official NCAA women’s basketball championship tournament in history.
Her most extended run of success, however, remains her 13 seasons at the helm of SFU, where her teams went a combined 363-79, making 11 NAIA national tournaments, three Final Fours and two national championship game appearances. And of course, it took the COVID-cancelled 2021 championships to deny her juggernaut Semiahmoo Totems the opportunity to win a third straight B.C. senior girls Quad-A title.
And as McNeill is asked to further reflect on the growth of both the girls and womens game in B.C., from her own high school playing days in the mid-1970s, to today, she’s suddenly triggered by a past memory.
“Something just popped into my head,” she begins with a chuckle. “When I was at SFU, I remember walking up the steps (to the old Chancellor’s Gymnasium) before a game and all of my players were coming down those steps,” recalls McNeill of a game night during her second season with the team back in the spring of 1990. “All of them wanted to know why it was getting so crowded, and I said ‘They are coming to watch you play.’ We sold out that place multiple times.”
Including the program’s historic 87-55 win over Oregon’s Pacific Boxers, played in front of an overflow crowd of over 2,000, which sent them to the national tournament for the first time in school history.
Kathy Shields won eight U SPORTS national Bronze Baby titles at Victoria, Bruce Langford won five more at Simon Fraser before the Red Leafs move to the NCAA and its two subsequent Sweet 16 appearances, and Deb Huband three more national crowns at UBC.
All of that is brought to your attention to re-affirm a high school-university eco system foe B.C. girls and women, which for at least a half-century, has produced some of the best talent in the nation.
“And now, with the Caitlin Clark movement and the WNBA front-loading women’s sports across the globe, everything has taken a big push forward,” says Braich of an environment that now exists around women’s sports, one which he himself admits gave the idea of moving the 2025 girls championship games to the Arena Bowl even more traction.
“I think deep down inside people are really thrilled with the gender equality side of it,” adds Braich, who in the midst of stating his case for the B.C. girls tournament’s Day 4 move to the Arena Bowl, helped affect a thaw in one of his own city’s biggest high school tournaments.
“Last year (2023-24), for the first time in history, the Abbotsford Police tournament played the boys final first, and the girls final last, and we brought in a female reffing crew,” he noted in terms of beginning what has now become an annual rotation in terms of who plays in the spotlight finale game.
“My discussion came with (Abbotsford Police tourney) board members who knew I was pushing for a move to the Arena Bowl, and who said ‘Well, we should be doing this in our own backyard, too.’”
And thus, just in time for its 75th anniversary, B.C. girls high school basketball takes its next big step forward.
And if too much of its glorious past has been kept a secret, there’s no time like the present to start turning a corner.
So in what is now the start of the official stretch-drive, 25-year run to a 100-year centennial celebration in 2050, this season’s move to the Arena Bowl can also be viewed as just the beginning.
And so it’s a time for celebrating everything that began in 1948 (BC tourneys were not held in 1956, 1957 and 2021) when coach Ruth Wilson led Vancouver’s John Oliver to a 19-18 win over New West’s Trapp Technical in Kelowna, to 2025 where defending champion Seaquam of North Delta and North Vancouver’s Argyle Pipers have taken turns at No. 1 in the Quad-A rankings this season.
“We have a very rich history in girls and women’s basketball in this province and we all want to continue to see it grow,” begins McNeill. “But growing is one thing. I am kind of an old-head and one of the greatest experiences of my life was playing high school basketball. So unless we celebrate this, we could lose this.”
Let the party begin.
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.
Fabulous article! It’s so refreshing to see, especially in the world we live in now, a concerted effort for equity.
Very excited to celebrate 75 years of excellence in women’s basketball!
Keep ’em coming Howard!
75 years of excellence. Thank you to all those who continue to organize youth sports with the game of basketball throughout this fine Province. May the memory of players, coaches, officials who are no longer with us, remain eternal.
It’s about time that the girls get the same venue as the boys. It’s too bad there has been no coverage of the jr girls tournament this past weekend as there were some fantastic games played.