Reports from Friday night’s two TBI Super 16 semifinals are here:
RIVERSIDE 68 SEAQUAM 64
By HOWARD TSUMURA
LANGLEY — Ari Brown is just starting to show us who she is supposed to become on the basketball court.
Yet there was Riverside’s 6-foot Grade 9 starter, in the heat of a TBI Super 16 Final Four fourth-quarter drive of Friday night, responding to the needs and wants of her Rapids’ teammates against the two-time defending B.C. Quad-A champion Seaquam Seahawks.
And to dial us all in a little bit closer: Her team was clinging to a narrow 55-54 lead with just 4:20 left on the clock.
Over the next four minutes, she’d hit three shots in the paint, step out to knock down a three and make a free throw… 10 of her team’s 12 points as part of a see-saw battle with Seaquam, and in the end part of a game-high 22-point outing which allowed her team to earn a berth in today’s 4:45 p.m. title-game clash against North Vancouver’s Argyle Pipers.
“At first, I was really nervous, but as I play each game, I just get more and more comfortable and slowly get more confidence as I go,” Brown said afterwards.
As we said off the top, Brown’s going to become her own player and she’s basically got four entire seasons of senior varsity basketball ahead of her.
Hearing that and watching her play kind of reminded your author about some first impressions from back in the 2022-23 season when Seaquam burst onto the scene with a galaxy of stars, including its 6-foot Grade 9 forward… a certain Camryn Tait, who last season ascended to the hallowed stage of Quad-A MVP at the provincial championships.
Tait watched last night’s game from the bench while working through the final stages of her recovery from an injured broken foot, and while we’re not suggesting that Brown is going to become the same kind of player as Tait, it is not a stretch to say that she has the potential to eventually have the same kind of impact on her team’s roster if she follows the same path of consistent improvement.
And that’s, as I have said over the decades, is one of the joys of watching great high school basketball programs do what they do best within the holistic depth of hallways, classrooms and gymnasiums.
As much as anything, it’s Brown’s willingness to take big shots in crucial spots that shone most. More reps will bring a dynamic polish that still is not there, yet her presence seems to represent yet another renaissance of talent coming through the Port Coquitlam program, especially in head coach Paul Langford’s front court where he has a troika of talent worth boasting about.
“She took advantage of the matchup, and if we’ve got those three towers in at the end, in high school basketball, we’re probably going to have a mismatch,” said Langford of Brown, the 6-foot-2 Grade 10 newcomer Cleo Beck, and the returning 6-foot Grade 11 vet Henna Virk, who the night before led the way in the quarterfinals against the Vernon Panthers. “We’re going to have a mismatch somewhere because all three of them can shoot it from the outside and all three can play.”
The cyclical nature of the game is highly unpredicatable. Sometimes bumper crop seasons come consecutively, and in others, there seems no end to drought.
Riverside and Seaquam, however, have been able to reap what they’ve sown, although on slightly differing time tables… and Riverside’s victory with only two seniors in its rotation makes them pretty hard to ignore.
On Friday, Grade 10 guard Francesca Salonga was as vital as anyone, , playing in tandem with Grade 12 guard Kaitlin Vergara, while scoring 20 points.
The aforementioned Beck, who rounded out the starting five, added nine points.
Seaquam head coach Lucky Toor, who saw his team beat Riverside a week ago by a point in the Victoria Invitational final, took the loss as snapshot of where his roster is at in the present moment.
“You know what? We had a tough time sometimes making the right decisions, the right reads,” he said. “It’s going to happen. We’re trying to put different kids into different spots right now.. But it’s just good early season experience for us, exactly what we need.”
Riverside took the flow out Seaquam’s halfcourt ball movement and, until late, didn’t let the Seahawks find the time and space to ignite one of its patented three-point tsunamis.
“We played them on the Island and we went under the screen, and this time we went over the screen and it worked for a long time,” admitted Langford.
Toor saw the same thing.
“They defend really well, especially off of ball screens,” he said. “And, you know, we rely a little bit on that. So one of the things we’ve got to take away from this is we’ve got to get creative. We’ve got to come up with other ways to generate our offence. And we’re also a transition team. We didn’t transition the way we normally would or expect to.”
The Seahawks got triple 17-point outings from Syra Toor, Callie Brost and Gurleen Bal, the latter joining her fellow seniors in the starting group this season and learning how to best bring her brand of physical play to the fore.
ARGYLE 72 HOLY CROSS 60
By HOWARD TSUMURA
LANGLEY — If there is one thing about basketball that has to be seen up-close-and-personal to appreciate, it’s the act of encountering real size and real physicality in the paint.
And in that regard, there is not a team in the province that can make an opposition offence understand more clearly what it sounds and feel as like when a tree doesn’t fall in the forest better than North Vancouver’s Argyle Pipers.
In the TBI Super 16 Final Four on Friday, as the Quad-A No. 3-ranked Pipers made the deep paint feel like an expanse of dense, old-growth, old-school survivalist territory, it was presence of its three-headed front-court that ultimately proved to be the difference in a 72-60 win over the Double-A No. 1 Holy Cross Crusaders of Surrey.
Their exclusive membership: 6-foot Isabella Miljkovic 27 points, 20 rebounds; 6-foot-5 Eva Woodward 14 points, 9 rebounds; 6-foot-2 Sophie Nicholson 6 points, 5 rebounds. Total damage — 47 pts, 34 rebounds.
“The three of them together are the best post combo in the province,” said Argyle head coach Anthony Beyrouti whose team will face Quad-A No. 2 Riverside in today’s 4:45 p.m. Super 16 final. “And they really push it and they get people involved and they look for each other too, which is nice. You know, one passes to the other and they finish together.”
Afterwards, the experience of having to play Argyle at its best was the hot topic, and two learned individuals offered their takes on what the ultimate impact of such an exercise can be on an opposing team.
“I’m still super proud of my team and that we battled back,” said Holy Cross head coach Amy Beauchamp, whose team trailed by 14 (60-46) before its star scoring guard Isla Iannuzzi hit four fourth-quarter threes as a part of a game-high 28 point outing. “We could have folded when we were down about 15 and instead we fought back, we became physical And that’s one of our weaknesses. We’ve struggled to be physical with teams and Argyle brings that out of you, which is really good for our team.”
Miljkovic was superb throughout, her brand of post moves, inside-outside scoring and motor allowing her to put together a 27-20 performance.
And then there was Woodward, whose arc has continued to carry her game to a point where she can be the primary physical deterrent to any team by bringing the willingness to stand in and stay square with purpose.
“And it’s not even that she’s throwing her elbows around or really beating the crap out of anybody,” said TFSETV broadcast analyst Cheryl Jean-Paul. “It’s just how hard you have to push against her as soon as she establishes her position. The one thing that she’s done a great job of is that you actually have to find her so early because she is scoring in transition as well. So now your physical battle starts so much earlier than just in the low block. When you look at the fact that right now Holy Cross only has two players that physically can really even slightly match her, whether it’s fronting or getting around, your two top players potentially on offence now have your team’s biggest battles on defence. That’s where it wears them down.”
Can’t be said anymore succinctly than that.
Holy Cross, however, doesn’t have to beat Argyle to win the B.C. championship like Seaquam and Riverside likely do.
And those two Holy Cross players that Jean-Paul referenced?
Solene Jackson and Alyssia Palma were held to a combined 16 points on the night, and while Beauchamp knows it’s early in the season, there was no question that facing the Pipers’ frontcourt is the best way to know what it feels like to fight for every square inch of space in the paint.
“I thought Alyssia was huge for us,” said Beauchamp, whose Crusaders lost by 30 points to Argyle in their first game of the season with both Palma and the guard Iannuzzi absent due to the B.C. volleyball championships. “We didn’t have her last time, but just her size and her physicality makes a big difference. And you could tell Eva felt it too. All of that takes a toll and I think they’ve realized that it takes a lot out of you. But I love the way we battled and I think that’s going to help us when we play our Double-A teams.
The Pipers backcourt were no slocuhes themselves, led by the 11 points and on-court generalship of senior Sadie Danks.
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