By Howard Tsumura
Varsity Letters
NORTH DELTA — Ever watch a high school basketball game in which at its conclusion both teams could rightly claim a loss, yet along the way to said result, laid bare a pure guts performance so compelling that as a spectator you just felt fortunate to have been in the gym?
That was the reaction of your author after witnessing the host Seaquam Seahawks defeat the visiting Johnston Heights Eagles 84-77 in a regular-season ending South Fraser Quad-A senior girls basketball game in the heart of North Delta’s Sunshine Hill’s neighbourhood on Wednesday night.
Earlier in the week, a message had arrived via e-mail outlining an unusual set of circumstances surrounding this game between the host, No. 3-ranked and two-time defending B.C. champion Seahawks, and a pair of Surrey schools in the No. 5-ranked Eagles of Surrey, as well as the No. 7-ranked Semiahmoo Thunderbirds.
The gist of the e-mail was simple enough:
*If Seaquam beat Johnston Heights by 10 points or more in the game in question, they would win the South Fraser and play host to the zone championship tournament.
*If Johnston Heights won, regardless of margin of victory, it would win the South Fraser and lay claim to the home court spoils which lay ahead.
*If Seaquam won by less than 10, idle Semiahmoo would win the regular season title and host zones.
Heading into the fourth quarter then, the Seahawks led by precisely 10 points (60-50) and seemed to have things going their way when they pushed their lead to 18 points (77-59) with the game’s stretch drive beckoning.
Yet that’s when the Eagles’ otherworldly Grade 10 guard, the 6-foot-1 Puneet Deol, took her game to yet another level.
As part of her game-high 52-point outing, the decisive, explosive and powerful Deol keyed a 12-0 Johnston Heights run, pulling her team to within 77-71 with 2:01 remaining.
There were the Eagles fighting furiously to cap their rally from 18 down, and there was a veteran Seahawks’ team, one forced to bring three new players into its starting rotation this season due to a key injury and heavy graduation tolls from a season ago, doing its utmost to trying to extend its streak of South Fraser regular-season titles to five.
Yet in the end, as the final score indicated, neither team actually wound up winning.Nonetheless thrilling theatre.
Deol’s uncanny ability to steal time and space from her opposition just long enough to put her defenders in jeopardy that made the difference.
Fouled by a phalanx of Seahawks with 7.4 seconds remaining, she put the finishing touches on that 52-point outing by knocking down a pair of free throws to finish 17-of-20 from the free throw line and pull her team to within its final margin of seven.
Even then it wasn’t fully over.
The Seahawks came out of a timeout with .5 seconds remaining having chalked up an inbounds three-point shot which would have given them their desired 10-point winning margin, but that fell shy at the buzzer.
No matter.
Deol, who has been averaging 29.4 ppg this season, her first full campaign at the senior varsity level, has long since ceased being a secret, yet her single-minded sense of purpose combined with her suddenness and power is only going to get better through her senior year of 2027-28.
And on the other side, a Seaquam team which has played all but the first four games of the current season without the services of its senior and reigning B.C Quad-A MVP Camryn Tait due to injury, has had no choice but to carry on, developing a new identity led by returning senior guards and next-level stalwarts Callie Brost and Syra Toor.
The pace, grit and poise of that duo, the only two players from the Seahawks’ top seven from a season ago, has been impressive, especially considering not only their play at both ends of the floor, but the ways in which they have fostered what is, in effect, a remaining core of main rotation players who just a couple of months ago were experiencing primetime senior varsity minutes for the first time in their careers.
Brost hit six threes and was her usual gritty self in and around the irons, finishing with a team-high 35 points while Toor, for whom the Eagles extended deep resources in defence, still hit three triples and finished with 16 points.
In the absence of Tait, senior forward Gurleen Bal has stepped into perhaps the biggest figurative shoes in the province She was always going to play ton, but now those minutes carry greater expectations, and on Wednesday, the 12 points she gave her team in the first half, before finishing with 14, were as big a contribution as any.
The 5-foot-11 Grade 11 guard Pauline Wanjura, a foreign exchange student, as well as senior centre Diya Gill and Grade 9 guard Aaliyah Toor rounded out the current main rotation on Wednesday.
So what’s in store the rest of the way?
South Fraser’s top three finishers — Seaquam, Johnston Heights and Semiahmoo are all ranked in the B.C. Top 10 — will all claim B.C. berths, with the possibility of a fourth team via the wild-card route also a possibility.
Heading into the opening round of playoffs next week at Semiahmoo where the big three all come in with 3-1 records (this season, Semiahmoo beat Seaquam 75-69 on Jan. 15, Johnston Heights beat Semiahmoo 67-64 on Jan. 19) where do the head coaches of Wednesday’s two games stand?
“I’m extremely proud of these girls,” said Johnston Heights head coach Harjit Deol, who also happens to be Puneet Deol’s father, of the team’s overall play on Wednesday.
“They’ve achieved beyond my wildest dreams. They work really hard. So, you know, I’m really proud of what they’ve done so far. And we’re not done yet.”
Puneet Deol’s performance Wednesday was, at times, jaw-dropping.
She played inside and out, hitting three threes, draw fouls in the half court and converting free throws at a near-automatic pace. Yet her mere presence was just as big a catalyst, and it’s empowered her teammates to realize what huge roles they can also play within the schematic.
“You know, sometimes I have to rein her in,” Harjit Deol says. “But I let her play. I think that’s the biggest thing with her is I give her the free reins to play her game.”
And while Deol was rallying her team in the fourth quarter it was impossible to miss the play of fellow Grade 10 teammate ChrisAndre Marriott, a 5-foot-11 guard, who scored eight of her 11 points in the fourth quarter including, as part of a back-to-back 10-second blitz, an offensive rebound and putback, then a steal and fastbreak lay-in, capping that aforementioned 12-0 fourth-quarter run.
The Seahawks?
Win a B.C. junior crown and two seasons later follow it up with back-to-back Quad-A crowns, all with the same core group of players, and the bar gains a lot of altitude before it is set.
“We’ve hosted the South Frasers for the last four years… it’s something we’ve almost become accustomed to, and that right to do that got taken away from us tonight,” Toor said moments after the game nobody won likely became a motivational starting point for his Seahawks the rest of the way.
“I thought our defensive rebounding wasn’t there. We missed a few key blockout situations. We didn’t play with the energy level that I expected us to play with. Obviously, when you’re playing a player of Puneet’s calibre, it’s a little bit of an anomaly in terms of how you have to defend her. I just felt like we didn’t bring the playoff intensity that was needed. We did enough to get a win, but not to win the game the way we could have.”
Semiahmoo and then-head coach Allison MacNeill, with its senior-laden team, was cruelly denied its rightful opportunity to chase a third-straight B.C. title due to the COVID-cancelled campaign of 2020-21.
The only coaches to accomplish a threepeat this century are both from Brookswood. Scott Reeves pulled off the feat 2004-06, while Neil Brown from 2014-16, followed exactly a decade later.
Heritage Park of Mission also won three straight 2000-02, with Bruce Langford winning the first two years before heading to SFU, with Frank Chan adding the third title.
If it can once again find its way to the LEC, the Seahawks would be in a position to challenge for those same historic spoils.
Yet with its resources challenged, most specifically a foot injury to its reigning MVP Tait, the one thing coach Toor knows is that his team has to stay in the present.
“I think right now we’re just trying to stay focussed on the players that are healthy,” he said when asked about Tait’s potential availability for the postseason. “You know, if there’s a remote chance that she does make herself healthy for a provincial run, wow, you know, we’d be over-excited, but I don’t think we’re hanging on to that hope right now either.
“We’re just trying to stay focussed on playing the best basketball we can with the group we have.”
Just 23 fast-closing days ahead of championship Saturday, Feb. 28 at the Langley Events Centre, on a night when you won but didn’t, that’s pretty sage advice.
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