LANGLEY — Welcome to Day 2 of TBI girls 2024!
We’re on to the quarterfinals today in the Super 16 pool
Please check back throughout the day as Howard Tsumura covers the day’s four championship round games!
ARGYLE 90 LORD TWEEDSMUIR 74
LANGLEY — If the Argyle Pipers do not have the greatest overall wingspan of any team in B.C. girls high school basketball then please let us know who it is.
On Thursday, as the TBI Super 16 tournament reached its quarterfinal stage here at the Langley Events Centre, North Vancouver’s Pipers patiently played four of their 6-foot-plus student-athletes, all of whom happen to be underclassmen, and by the time the fourth quarter came along, the North Vancouver team’s combination of size and athleticism was finally able to slow the super-tempo, three-point shooting ways of Surrey’s Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers 90-74.
“The length defensively is what really helps,” said Pipers head coach Anthony Beyrouti after his No. 5-ranked team played through a first half in which is absolutely dominated the offensive glass yet managed just a 40-39 halftime lead over the No. 6 Panthers.
“As a group, when we played connected defence, good things will happen.”
Good things also happened on the offensive end.
With point guard Sophie Danks able to work her team through the Panthers’ aggressive, full-court trapping ways, the payoff eventually came in the paint for Argyle.
Misses inside turned into the high-percentage makes they needed to be from the Pipers’ perspective.
And face it, these days, how many times are you going to see a team win by hitting only two three-pointers while gobbling up the painted areas and knocking down 39 good, old-fashioned regulation-length buckets?
Kind of refreshing, actually.
And how about the lion’s share of those two-pointer from a six-foot Grade 10 guard?
Mariia Mayden poured home a game-high 38 points for the winners, showcasing a nose for the rim and a real feel to score in traffic.
“It’s because she took her time and she finished inside when she had to, and that was really cool,” said Beyrouti. “To see a Grade 10 kid do that, she was calm, cool and she was collected. And she took care of business.”
Sophie Nicholson, a 6-foot-1 Grade 11 with a huge ceiling as a big guard with inside abilities, added 18. Eva Woodward, the team’s 6-foot-6 Grade 11 post had 14 while Alanna Schiemman, a 5-foot-10 senior guard scored 10.
The Panthers were led by its 5-foot-4 Grade 11 point guard Hanna Grewal, an absolute energetic force who besides scoring 18 points, epitomized her team’s unflappable nature as a running, three-point shooting team.
Saavyn Mann and Sammy Ma each scored 11 in the loss.
Argyle will now face the Brookswood-Kelowna winner in a 7:45 p.m. semifinal Friday.
Said coach Beyrouti of the Pipers’ ceiling to improve as a team: “We have taken the challenge of playing man defence this year and our goal is to be the best man defence team in the province. We’re definitely not there yet, and if we can put that together by the end of the season, then we are going to be a tough out come the end of February.”
RIVERSIDE 68 G.W. GRAHAM 63
LANGLEY — Jorja Hart is beginning to embrace her new role as the Riverside Rapids’ starting point guard.
“It’s a different style for me,” the 5-foot-10 senior explained after helping lead PoCo’s No. 3-ranked Rapids into the Tsumura Basketball Invitational Super 16 Final Four on Friday following a fantastic fourth-quarter finish to get past the No. 4 G.W. Graham Grizzlies of Chilliwack in an elite Quad-A quartefinal clash.
“I am used to Avery Sussex and our-run-and gun thing but now I’ve move to point guard and I am getting the hang of it a little bit,” Hart continued, referencing the 2024 B.C. MVP currently playing her freshman season at Div. 1 UC-Davis.
Well, the humble Hart may be downplaying the impact she is having from her new position.
On Thursday, when her team needed her to have the ball in her hands and make things happen, she did, pouring home a game-high 38 points to lead the Rapids to victory.
Hart’s layin with 1:49 remaining, which gave the Rapids a 66-63 lead, capped off her evening in fine fashion.
“I think we just kept talking positive, made sure to have good body language and keep the energy up. It took some big hoops, but I think we knew if we stuck with it we could pull it out in the end.”
That wound up being true, but oh boy can these Grizzlies play.
When Rapids’ head coach Paul Langford went to a zone midway through the second quarter, the Grizzlies simply reared up and rained threes, including the final dagger… a triple from forward Jada Paquin that put Graham ahead 33-24 with 4:20 left in the half.
“They made me pay,” said Langford. “I got out there in a hurry.”
Despite being unable to make the Final Four Friday festivities, the Grizz continue to serve notice that they are not the same team which lost to eventual B.C. champion Seaquam in the second round of last season’s B.C. tourney.
“They’ve got lots of players, lots of kids that can play and you can tell they are ballers,” said Langford. “Their bigs can shoot, they scoot around.”
Paquin, the 6-foot-2 centre, continues to be the lynchpin of the operation, and her ability to hit inside and out remains huge for the Grizzlies.
Paquin scored a team-high 25 points in the loss, while Nicole Folka added 14. Ashlyn Adams added eight more for a GWG team which led 38-34 at halftime.
Hart was a dynamo for the Rapids, hitting three threes, and going 11-of-14 from the stripe en route to scoring her 38 points.
Annabelle Neufeld added eight of her 12 points over the final 5:28, and without the 5-foot-11 senior scoring nine straight for her team at one point, including a trey with 3:27 left for a 62-59 lead, Riverside could well be headed for Friday’s consolation round.
The Rapids play the Seaquam-Holy Cross winner in Friday’s first (6:15 p.m.) semifinal.
BROOKSWOOD 62 KELOWNA 56
LANGLEY — One night after Jordyn Nohr had the best scoring game of her senior varsity career against a B.C. opponent with 52 points, she and her teammates showed that they find ways to win even when the opposition increases its defensive presence against their offensive pace-setter .
With an early surge of three-point shooting from senior forward Hazel Phillips and some big plays down the stretch drive in the paint on both sides of the floor from 6-foot-2 Grade 10 centre Ashely Vande Ven, the Quad-A No. 2 Bobcats dug deep to defeat a hungry No. 10-ranked Kelowna Owls team by a 62-56 count.
Phillips hit three second-quarter triples and finished with five on the night en rout to a 16-point outing, and Vande Ven, who scored a team-high 19 points but was even more impactful with her shot-blocking and rebounding prowess in the second half stepped up big on a night when Nohr got a lot of defensive attention from the Owls.
Nonetheless, Nohr still scored 17 points for the winners who face North Vancouver’s No. 5 Argyle Pipers in a 7:45 p.m. semifinal on Friday.
“In the second half we really stepped up our defence,” said Brookswood head coach Chrissy Nohr when asked what meant the most in finally gaining some separation against the dialled-in Owls. “We grabbed some rebounds, looked to run and got some fast break layups. That really helped.”
Vande Ven with her defence, and her desire to run the floor hard were especially impressive over the final five minutes of the fourth quarter.
After Owls’ forward Cali Ausenhus was helped off the floor after suffering what appeared to be a knee injury with 6:59 left and her team trailing by a point at 49-46, Kelowna got a quick bucket from Jasmin Guarasci to pull within 49-48.
But from that point, Brookswood’s defence put in its best stretch of the game, highlighted by Vande Ven blocking Kelowna’s Mavleen Chahal on a three-point attempt.
On Brookswood’s prior possession, Vande Ven had turned a 65-foot bullet pass from Nohr under the basket and turned it into an lay-up.
Phillips with a trey and Vande Ven converting her own offensive rebound helped Brookswood keep a 10-point margin, just enough to prevent the Owls from a chance to win the game in dying seconds.
“I definitely wanted to play my hardest for every rebound I could… try to get as many ‘O’ boards as I could and limit my check from getting offensive boards on their end,” said Vande Ven, selected the Player of the Game.
“I just wanted to make sure I looked for teammates in the right time so we got the best shot out of every possession.”
Chahal was her usual excellent self for Kelowna, scoring a game-high 27 points. She hit three first-quarter triples, and scored nine points in the fourth quarter of a low-scoring game. Ava Thiessen hit four threes to finish with 12 points, while Guarasci finished with nine.
SEAQUAM 65 HOLY CROSS 39
LANGLEY — It might not be the first thing you think of when asked to name a defining trait of the defending B.C. senior girls Quad-A basketball champions from Seaquam Secondary.
Yet in all it glory, it was on display Thursday as the opening minutes of the No. 1-ranked Seahawks’ Tsumura Basketball Invitational Super 16 quarterfinal against the Double-A No. 2 Holy Cross Crusaders of Surrey played out on the South Court of the Langley Events Centre.
Last weekend, in the semifinals of the Victoria Invitaitonal, Seaquam got all it could handle from the same Crusaders and to scrap and battle to come away with a 63-58 win.
Sure enough, Holy Cross’ win Wednesday on TBI’s opening day over the Okanagan Mission set up a rematch between the Crusaders and Seahawks.
And right off the opening tip-off, Seaquam got off to one of its best starts of the young season, building a 37-13 lead early by early in the second quarter on the backs of a defence that got stops and keyed transition.
And all of that paved the way for a 65-39 victory.
So what’s the trait?
There is something to be said for the adaptability of a roster and all the ways, when tweaked on a greaseboard, can completely change a team’s look. It’s something that the Seahawks have that not a lot of others do.
“What gets overlooked, is that they played us right down to the wire in Victoria,” Seaquam head coach Lucky Toor said after a win that sends the North Delta team into Friday’s Final Four against an old rival, PoCo’s Riverside Rapids.
“Holy Cross are very athletic with Alyssia (Palma) and Solene (Jackson),” Toor said of the Crusaders’ two 6-foot-1 forwards, “so they can give us some matchup issues. But today we were ready based on how last week’s game went. We made a few changes on the defensive end as far as the matchups and what we were looking to do. It worked in our favour.”
Of course it was all about defence.
Place Thursday’s 65-39 victory against last week’s 63-58 triumph and it’s doesn’t;t take long to realize that while its offensive totals were just a bucket different, the defensive side of the equation was an improvement of 19 in the points-allowed column.
“Once again their concentration for us is on the defensive end,” continued the head coach of his team. “We have started games where we miss a couple shots we might make later on but the entire attention is paid to the defensive end. If we stay dialled in on that over the course of 40 minutes we will find our opportunities to score.”
That’s what indeed transpired.
Star forward Camryn Tait had 19 points by the half and finished with 21 after retiring to the bench a lot earlier than she had to last Friday in Victoria.
Point guard Syra Toor was dialled in from downtown with four triples a part her 18-point night.
Jackson had 12 for Holy Cross and Palma 11 for Holy Cross.
“It’s nice to have good athletes on your team that can guard two or three positions and when you can do that, then you can create different matchups and different looks throughout the game,” said Toor.
Next, it’s the renewal of what has become a real rivalry with Riverside.
Seaquam beat the Rapids in last season’s TBI final, and later in the B.C. Quad-A final.
This season, they topped them again in the final of Victoria Invitational.
But all Toor knows is that Riverside is the kind of opposition that you have to be fully prepared for to have a chance to win.
“It’s going to be a war tomorrow night,” he concluded. “It’s not going to be an easy game.”
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