BY HOWARD TSUMURA
VARSITYLETTERS.ca
ABBOTSFORD — When you’ve coached basketball for three-plus decades at the same school, you arrive at a juncture of your career where your words begin to carry an-ever deeper meaning.
So when MEI Eagles’ senior girls head coach Rick Thiessen, who this season finds himself in his 31st year of guiding either a senior, junior, Grade 8 team (or a combination thereof) at the Abbotsford-based school, is asked just what’s been up with the B.C. No. 1-ranked Triple-A team’s red-hot play in the month of January, you can believe that his answer comes without a trace of hyperbole.
“I have been at this so long, it’s an amazing story for me personally as a coach to see a group of girls come together like this,” Thiessen said over the phone Wednesday morning of a team which last season bowed out of provincial-title contention in the quarterfinals, but has this season fashioned an 18-5 record against B.C. foes which includes two wins apiece over both the reigning B.C. champion and Quad-A No. 1 Seaquam (2-0) Seahawks, as well as its No. 6-ranked crosstown rivals, the Yale Lions Yale (2-1). MEI has also beaten North Vancouver’s No. 3-ranked Argyle Pipers (1-2) and the No. 5 Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers (1-0) of Surrey.
And while winning a provincial title is a lifetime achievement for any team, the added marquee of just such a B.C. title win coming as part of the tournament’s 75th anniversary adds yet another layer of meaning. This season’s event, which caps its fourth-and-final day, for the first time ever, within the confines of the Langley Event Centre’s Arena Bowl, runs Feb. 26-March 1 for all four of the province’s tiers of competition.

Besides falling to Argyle and Yale, MEI also lost early in the season to another pair of Quad-A teams in No. 2 Brookswood Bobcats of Langley, and Coquitlam’s No. 9 Dr. Charles Best Blue Devils. Its remaining two losses came as part of a 2-2 showing against U.S. competition just after Christmas in Palm Springs, CA.
Yet the team’s only loss thus far in 2025 came this past Saturday night in the championship final of the Seaquam Seahawks’ tournament in North Delta.
The Eagles, who has earlier beaten Seaquam 74-70 in the semifinals of the Top 10 tournament at Chilliwack’s G.W. Graham Secondary, beat the host Seahawks 76-71 in the morning semifinals before falling to Argyle in the title tilt later that evening. Argyle and MEI had split a pair of games to start the season as part of The Big Ticket tournament.
“I’ve seen some of my former players from time to time (this season) and I tell them ‘Sorry girls, this is the best team I’ve ever coached,’” Thiessen says with a needling yet altogether prideful chuckle, “and that is saying something.
“I saw Taylor Claggett (MEI alumna, 2014 provincial all-star, all-time leading scorer at UFV, current Columbia Bible women’s HC) this week, and she knows a lot of these girls, and she said ‘I can’t disagree with you… sadly.
“When you get a core that is this strong and athletic and committed, it’s amazing. I’ve had some really good teams over the years but this one is unique in terms of how deep I can go, and it makes no difference who is in the game.”
This weekend, the Eagles will play in their final invitational of the season in Surrey at Tessa’s Tournament where they will face an all Triple-A menu of games against the Sa-Hali Sabres of Kamloops, and Prince George’s Duchess Park Condors and College Heights Cougars.

DEFINING ‘UNIQUE’
As the calendar prepares to turn to February, all of the teams at all four tiers of play in B.C. who feel they have a shot at provincial title contention begin to examine their rosters with a much more critical eye.
It’s that time for roles to be fully embraced and for belief to become the final ingredient.
Within MEI’s 10-player rotation — which includes three foundational seniors in its starting line-up along with a gutsy Grade 10 point guard — there is an undeniable harmony between its length, speed and overall athleticism, all of which immediately jumps to the fore.
“I think that’s our strength,” Thiessen says. “We’re athletic across the board, but we also have a lot of length. Between Lola (Reimer) and Tanayah (Bos), and Ella (Tatlock) and Julianna (Reimer), they are six-feet or taller, and all of them can play.”
Of that aforementioned quartet, two are starters. On its own, that speaks to the quality of their depth.
Lola Reimer is the 6-foot small forward who puts up a team-leading 15.3 ppg to go along with 6.0 rebounds and 2.0 steals per game. She is headed for Langley’s Trinity Western University next season to play for veteran head coach Cheryl Jean-Paul.
The other starter is 6-foot-1 Grade 11 forward Ella Tatlock, the team’s third-leading scorer at 13.0 ppg and 7.0 rpg.
Off-guard Olivia Sidhu, whose speed was impossible to ignore last season, is the Eagles’ leading backcourt scorer and she has brought a different level of consistency with her three-point shot this season while averaging 15 points and 2.5 steals per game. Next season Sidhu will play in the OUA for the Ottawa Gee-Gees.
KyLia Schellenberg, the 5-foot-7 Grade 10 point guard whom Thiessen labels as “fearless”, and 5-foot-10 senior forward Mya Buttar, who has thrived in a more physical low-post role this season after proving her mettle as a long-range shooter last season, round out the starting group.

SENIOR SERVICE
The Eagles’ run at B.C. Triple-A title ended in the quarterfinals last season following its 69-58 loss to a Reynolds Roadrunners team from Victoria which was just older and more experienced in the front court than they were.
Yet Thiessen knew that the sum total of the junior-aged players — the rising Grade 10s in Schellenberg, as well as sisters Tanayah and 5-foot-7 guard Ali Bos, and the rising Grade 11s in Tatlock and 6-foot-1 Julianna Reimer — along with the rising Grade 12 quintet led by Lola Reimer, Sidhu and Buttar, but also including guards Avery Currie and Brooklyn Ross, could indeed combine to become even greater than the sum of their parts.
“Last year, our provincials ended on March 2, and that following Monday I had lunch with Lola, Olivia and Mya,” remembers Thiessen. “I told them that our next season started today and that I wanted us to be the hardest working girls on the court. I told them ‘You will lead the rest of the team by your example’ and then I assigned each of them two other players I wanted them to reach out to through the spring and the summer.”
That meeting and the subsequent acceptance of mentorship roles galvanized the team’s 2024-25 buy-in, and seemed to have an especially profound impact on the senior Reimer.
“Along with Mya and Olivia, Lola has just revolutionized her approach to being a great teammate,” her coach said of the third of four Reimer sisters, including the oldest in Kaylie, the former TWU player and current Western Mustangs senior, Makenna, the Eagles’ 2021-22 leading scorer, and of course, the aforementioned Grade 11 Julianna.
“She has always been talented, a gifted three-point shooter, but this year she is disciplined, working hard on defence, and it’s all come together. It’s been amazing,” Thiessen added of Lola Reimer.
But mostly it’s been all about creating the perfect basketball storm, the kind which enables a group of athletes to tap in to a collective space where all contributions are recognized and celebrated.

To that end, Thiessen began a post-game honour to recognize “…the intangible things that help us win. It might be for a single play in the game, or for your overall game.”
The award is called ‘Dawg of the Game’ and whomever is chosen that game’s winner, receives a t-shirt with a special saying that is worn by the recipient during the warm-up for the team’s next game.
“It has a phrase that Lola and Olivia and Mya came up with… ‘I am literally just a girl’ and that is on the front of the t-shirt,” continued Thiessen. “It’s a phrase from a Simpsons episode from way back, but it’s come back to life on TikTok. The sense of it is ‘Look what I can do though I am literally just a girl.’ It started out as something funny, and they were a little embarrassed to wear it in warmup. But now there is a lot of pride in it.”

And even more?
“Everyone on this team has won it at least once,” the veteran coach says. “That’s what I love about this team. In our 27 games so far, I can count maybe three times when not everyone has played. Everyone plays in almost every single game because they can all play.”
Thiessen and the Eagles came out on the short-end of a 51-46 score to Richmond’s R.A. McMath Wildcats in the 2022 B.C. championship final, but now three seasons and one full cycle later, they are back in contention for all the spoils, this time with their sights set on first qualifying for the Big Dance, then taking their shot at winning the school’s first B.C. senior girls title since 1999.
There are still plenty of pages to be written when it comes to what has been a breakthrough 2024-25 campaign, yet based on the Eagles’ large body of work through December and January, it’s not hard to understand why Rick Thiessen keeps using the word ‘unique’ to describe both the student-athletes on his roster, and all the ways in which they have come together to create a single, winning identity.
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