LANGLEY — Take a quick glance at the main rotation in the back court of the Final Four-bound Terry Fox Ravens here at the 2025 B.C. junior boys basketball championships in Langley, and all the while tell yourself that looks can be deceiving.
It’s guys like Diego Castro. Robi Felipe. Santiago Castro. Ricky Adam.
They don’t exactly look like a group of guards who square you up, get right in your grill, then reach over and through their defensive actions perform basketball’s version of ripping out your heart.
“If you look at them, they don’t look like the most athletic guys,” said Terry Fox co-head coach Brad Peterson of his guards and his entire team in a more general sense, “but man, they’ve got a mindset and it’s just like ‘You’re not going to beat me.”
Hidden within a stuffed stat sheet are rips, deflections and steals… the little things that the PoCo-based, No. 3-seeded Ravens collected, turning the profits of defence into a major industry en route to a 58-45 win over Surrey’s No. 22-seeded Sullivan Heights Stars, and advancing the defending B.C. champs — albeit with vastly different personnel — into the Final Four and a showdown with East Vancouver’s St. Patrick’s Celtics.
Last season, Terry Fox beat St. Patricks in the B.C. final.
“I think it’s always defence first for our team,” said Peterson. “We want to see how our pressure defence, how teams can handle it, because offensively we haven’t really been able to get it going. Defence, for us, has been creating offence all tournament so we’re kind of sticking with that. From practice No. 1 in October we preached pressure defence.”
Diego Castro and Felipe each scored 15 points for the winners, while Joel Pelland added 12.
Sullivan Heights got a game-high 22 points from Spencer McEvoy and 11 more from post Dhian Sidhu.
And speaking of Terry Fox’s guards, it’s no secret to say that with five Final Fours in the past six B.C. tournaments, St. Pats has created a gold standard for guard play at the B.C. junior tournament over the past half decade.
The Ravens dropped a close game to St. Patricks earlier this season, and Peterson acknowledges the degree of difficulty will go up a notch or two on Monday.
“This is going to be a different challenge for us,” he said. “We played them in January and it was a track meet, an up-and-down game. We’re looking forward to this challenge.”
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“Diego Castro and Phillip each scored 15 points for the winners, while Joel Pelland added 12.”
Is ‘Phillip” supposed to be ‘Felipe’? Cmon man. At LEAST put Robi Felipe and respect him as you do others. Do better.