He attended Vancouver Grizzlies games as a kid, then went on to play in the NBA for the Los Angeles Lakers.And through it all, it’s hard to think of anyone who has more passionately repped B.C.’s Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley regions as rightful professional basketball territory than Robert Sacre.With all of that in mind, […]
Tag: bc boys high school basketball
VL Podcast 03.03.21: Centennial’s Steve Pettifer reflects on playing days at SFU and UBC, and a 40-year high school coaching career!
Welcome to the Varsity Letters podcast. There is no better time than this week, one traditionally reserved for the B.C. senior girls basketball championships, to catch up with former Centennial head coach Steve Pettifer, who in the last 1980s, led the Centaurs to five straight provincial Final Fours, including a pair of titles. Pettifer, brought […]
VL Podcast 02.24.21: Veteran referee Karn Dhillon, who reflects on the sudden passing of friend Felix Gonzalez, speaks to the tight-knit bond of BC’s hoops community
Welcome to the latest edition of the Varsity Letters podcast. Today we chat with longtime basketball referee Karn Dhillon on a variety of topics spanning a career that began not too soon after he graduated from Vancouver’s Sir Winston Churchill in the late 1970s. Dhillon also eulogizes his friend, longtime and well-loved referee Felix Gonzalez […]
Richmond’s rebounder for the ages: A craving for caroms has Utah Valley’s Fardaws Aimaq treading on historic NCAA Div. 1 hardwood!
As the NCAA men’s Div. 1 regular season draws towards its completion, the microscope trained one of B.C.’s high school basketball’s most remarkable grads has continued to intensify.Yet nothing is slowing down the per-game rebounding average of former Steveston-London grad Fardaws Aimaq, the 6-foot-11, 260-pound redshirt sophomore centre with the Utah Valley Wolverines.With four more […]
VL Podcast 02.17.21: From Bby South to SFU to Fox, Moody, Vanier and the world, Larry Street has been a ‘Mr. Basketball’ for the ages!
Varsity Letters is back this week with one of B.C.’s most enduring basketball coaches and personalities: Larry Street. The former Burnaby South grad, who played collegiately at Simon Fraser and has, for the past generation, coached the senior boys varsity at Courtenay’s G.P. Vanier Secondary, Street joins host Howard Tsumura to chat about his lifelong […]
A Sunday Read: After making the biggest shot of his life, UFV Cascades’ guard Jordyn Sekhon reflects on the power of preparation!
It was the late, great John Wooden who once quipped: “When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare.”Delivered a full half-century ago, in an era where catchphrases weren’t so immediately fated to become commercialized cliches, the wise words of the Wizard of Westwood have retained a dignity and a depth of meaning so instantly relevant […]
May the circle be unbroken: How North Delta’s original 1957 basketball court was rescued & re-purposed as a unifying symbol for Huskies old and new!
NORTH DELTA — Basketball’s centre-court circle.Within the dimensions of the sport’s time-honoured schematic, it’s always been the place where the narrative begins… that perfectly circular gathering point measuring a regulation 12 feet in diametre which never fails to welcome its two combatants to Act 1, Scene 1.And just like theatre’s most well-trodden stages, the passing […]
Tsumura Basketball Invitational: Optimism rules as we set tentative Dec. 2021 dates for an LEC return! Here’s our list of 40 boys and girls teams!
LANGLEY — Hope springs eternal here with all of us behind the scenes at the Tsumura Basketball Invitational.While our annual two weeks of early-season ‘Welcome Back’ to the B.C. senior boys and girls basketball world was, of course, cancelled this past December due to the global pandemic, we here at the TBI have our fingers […]
Rowell and Aimaq! B.C.’s one-two punch of ‘Ty and Daws’ each play starring roles Friday in the WAC as Cal Baptist, Utah Valley both get big W’s!
It was a Friday night in which B.C.’s best Div. 1 men’s basketball talent took a backseat to no one in the NCAA’s Western Athletic Conference.Point guard Ty Rowell keyed a game-changing 16-3 second-half run with nine of his 17 points, the Langley-Walnut Grove grad never leaving the floor on a night in which he […]
It’s a continental hoops cuisine! Matt McKay’s virtual Sands Basketball Clinics unite B.C. & North American coaches in the name of the game!
NORTH DELTA — They say that silence is deafening, and in perhaps the cruelest of ways, that was the auditory state most common among both high school basketball players and their coaches as each began 2021 by walking into gymnasiums normally teeming with the activity of a season in progress.“We all realized that last Wednesday […]