LANGLEY — B.C. boys high school basketball has the website that is the envy of the entire B.C. high school sports world.
Voluminous and complete, it has for years been the lifeline of information for its teams, coaches, players and just as important, its fans and the media, providing not only complete schedules, but scores updated across the entire province on a nightly basis at the senior varsity level.
Since the start of the provincial health mandate Dec. 20 which has put all tournament play on hold until at least the end of this month, however, that network of reliability has taken some hits.
Coaches, in their attempt to find single games to make up for the loss of upwards of the 16-to-20 games they could have played at the myriad of invitational tournaments scheduled in January alone, have had to basically re-make entire portions of their 2021 non-league schedules.
And when you’re talking about 300 or so schools, that can be problematic, says Tom Tagami, the longtime administrator of the B.C. boys site at bcboysbasketball.com
“Just encourage the coaches to get their schedules in to me,” Tagami said Wednesday morning when contacted by Varsity Letters, “especially now, because it’s the only way people can see what’s going on in the province.
“If coaches aren’t getting their new schedules in to me, it’s the game that is going to suffer because we’re losing our ability to know what is happening around the province.”
The coaches-only place to send all scheduling information: bcboysbball@gmail.com
Any sports site is only as good as its reliability, and that is something which takes mass co-operation.
For his part, Tagami, who is assisted by Steveston-London head coach Mike Stoneburgh in this endeavour, wants coaches to know they are not bothering him if they need to send him multiple updates to their schedules.
In fact, he says it’s ultimately more efficient because it avoids a mass of games having to be added to the site, and it prevents having to enter a score for a game that was never officially on the schedule.
“There have been very few scores coming in and I think what it is, is a lot of people are slow to organize to get replacement games,” Tagami added. “As a result, they may have one or two games (scheduled), but what tends to happen is coaches will only send me a note when they have eight or nine games. It’s frustrating. I think people end up waiting, saying I don’t want to bug him with two games. Then, all of a sudden I will get a score sent to me saying ‘This team beat that team by this score’, and the game wasn’t (on the schedule), because we rely on self-reporting (of scores).”
Tagami, a longtime former head coach himself at Killarney, wants B.C.’s senior boys coaches to know he is sensitive to all of their struggles at the moment, from having to do the book-keeping aspects of their ‘jobs’ while trying to keep their teams in some semblance of physical and mental balance at a time when there are no guarantees about anything.
“The other thing that concerns me is that because no fans are allowed in so many of the gyms, that some coaches may be saying ‘What’s the point?’” Tagami continued. “They might be saying to themselves ‘Is there any point putting up (new schedules), because no fans are coming?’ Or ‘Maybe, if we just get the scores up there eventually… that’s all that counts.’ But I am hoping it all comes together.”
So the bottom line to B.C. senior boys basketball coaches?
As you re-schedule exhibition games around the tournament ban, send them to the website. And then just continue to self-report your scores.
It’s an eco-system that succeeds when we’ve all got each other’s backs and it extends outward to the promotion and the popularity of the sport through the media.
But most of all, there is a dedicated fan base which can not wait to cheer you on, every step of the way.
Remember, the place to send it all: bcboysbball@gmail.com
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