By HOWARD TSUMURA
VARSITY LETTERS
LANGLEY — The origin story of the mighty Wolves of Windsor might best be told along the lines of some script in development for the next big supernatural teen drama series.
Set amongst the towering Douglas Fir, within a secret den somewhere amongst the vast expanse of North Vancouver’s Lynn Canyon Park, a pack of headstrong wolf cubs one day decide to walk out of the forest forever, knowing they can never return, yet willing to risk it all on an ancient myth which has promised their generation the ability to assume the identity of the varsity boys basketball team at nearby Windsor Secondary, and whereafter all of their actions shift in dimension from fiction to fact.
Against all odds, these freshly-minted Windsor Wolves take the entire province by storm, and by this past Saturday night at the Langley Events Centre, the final horn would sound in their 66-58 win over Burnaby’s St. Thomas More Knights, completing their transformation from a nomadic band of brothers to those of provincial champions.
OK, OK, so it wasn’t all that neat and tidy.
Windsor made some minor rumblings last season when it qualified for the 2024 provincial championships, however a 74-60 loss on Day 1 to Abbotsford’s MEI Eagles immediately took them out of title contention.
And even when they showed up at the 2025 B.C. tournament as Vancouver Sea-to-Sky zone champions and the 16-team draw’s No. 2 seed, it seemed that without a pedigree to hang their hat on, they were still considered mere interlopers, inviting the doubters who needed to see something real under the bright lights before they could truly believe.
In hindsight? Oh, how those doubters were wrong.
High school basketball teams are pretty much all non-descript until the very moment they aren’t, and that’s because for the special ones, at some point in their examination under the scrutiny of the provincial tournament stage, their super power is brought to light.
Windsor’s?
Over the course of its four-game run to the title run it became increasingly clear that these Wolves were constructed, by accident or by fate, to be just unique enough to foil the most thorough of game plans.
What was revealed within its regular eight-man rotation, the majority of which ranges in height from 6-foot to 6-foot-6, is what can best be described as a kind of pack mentality.
You find a way to slow one wolf, and there are still four others carrying an equal purpose to continue with the task at hand.
“Windsor is kind of a dream team for a coach,” said Paul Eberhardt, the West Vancouver Highlanders senior boys head coach, and the analyst on the LEC’s livestreams of both Triple-A and Quad-A Final Fours and title game broadcasts.
“They’ve got five guys who are going to score between 12-to-15 points (per game), guys who are going to get between like six-to-10 rebounds, who are collectively going to get three or four assists each, and who can all defend together.
“It’s hard to play teams like that because when you shut one down, another steps up and did what they all did tonight.”
One look at the box score confirms it, with points, rebounds and assists (in the order) listed for all five of the team’s starters: Guards Lukas Chung (14-6-4), Elias Neilson (11-14-1), and forwards Oscar Rouillard (18-7-3), Emmet Ward (10-13-3) and Perrin Taylor (13-11-1).
Much was made throughout the basketball provincials that over the course of the fall championship season, Windsor’s football and boys soccer teams had each won B.C. Double-A titles.
Conclusive proof has not yet been presented, but there is a strong chance that the Wolves (formerly the Dukes) are now the only senior boys team in B.C. high school history to win three senior boys team titles in the same high school year.
And with four members of the football team (Rouillard, Sam Sachter, Xavian Washington, Ward), and Jude Cortiula from the soccer team on the roster, there is enough karma in the mix to insist that the team’s measure of multi-sport athletes has not only given it a broader base of intuition, but an innate ability to adapt to differing styles of play.
“I just think it’s a special group of athletes,” explained Fong, 39. “We have played fast-flowing games where we score 100, and some other games where we score 50 points and we’ve won. And the one thing I harken back to is our defence. On any given night we can shoot poorly or we can shoot well. But the only thing that always plays is our defence. Our goal every night is to limit teams to 50 points. Against a very, very good team we almost accomplished that goal.”
To re-purpose a moniker so deservingly worn by the greatest Raptor ever, Vince Carter, Windsor: Half-wolf, Half-Amazing.
THE BATTLE TO STOP ZERU
St. Thomas More beat St. Georges who lost in the Final Four to Spectrum who ultimately beat Dover Bay to win the B.C. senior boys Quad-A title.
Connecting teams and their results against each other over the course of the season is certainly not a fool-proof indicator of a team’s strength.
But it’s fun.
And to watch STM’s Knights not only beat St. George’s, but follow the next day with a win over Vancouver College to reach the finals of the Tsumura Basketball Invitational’s Super 16 bracket back in early December was to see a team unlocking its vast potential on an ascent to No. 1 in the Triple-A rankings.
Along the way, STM’s 6-foot-3 senior guard Zeru Abera has so naturally grown into one of the province’s truly great players, an intangibles-filled leader who this season, was among a small handful of stars you’d absolutely want to have with the ball in his hands in a game-winning situation.
Yet even the UBC-bound Abera was frustrated by the way Windsor would flood multiple bodies into his deep post wheelhouse, ultimately inhibiting his team’s ability to not only score in the paint, but gain the second-chance opportunities afforded through its ‘sheer-will’ brand of offensive rebounding.
“It’s definitely that we weren’t able to clean up on the offensive boards,” said Abera, who nonetheless still scored a game-high 24 points to go along with nine rebounds, three off the offensive window.
Windsor out-rebounded STM 55-35, and within that number were 11 Knights’ offensive rebounds won on the same backboard that the Wolves collected 41 defensive rebounds. Key in the clean-up mission were the 6-foot-5 duo of burly B.C. title-winning, 220-pound quarterback Emmet Ward and Grade 11 receiver Oscar Rouillard, the pair seemingly playing, for much of the evening, the hoops equivalent of a rush end and linebacker closing in for a shared sack.
And while those kinds of rebounding numbers can never be judged in a vacuum, it’s important to note that Abera’s ability to jump, re-jump, and then do it all again if he has to with a motor that never quits, might have been the single most identifiable player-trait of any STM player this season.
“Obviously he’s one heck of a player,” said Fong of Abera. “I watched film on him all yesterday and the day before thinking we would likely playing them, and our game plan was to use our height to our advantage. He is not the tallest player, and Emmet and Oscar are Type-A athletes. So all year, whenever we have run into a high level scorer, we say we are going to put those two guys in there, let them play one-on-one, and then we limit the rest of the team from scoring.”
Said Ward, next season off to the University of Waterloo to study aviation and take snaps from centre in the OUA: “I really pride myself on my defence. That’s the strongest part of my game. I just put my best foot forward and play my game. I do defence.”
And thus from the time STM guard Jacob Oreta made a layup with 3:55 remaining to pull the Knights within two at 54-52, the Windsor defence settled in to create the final separation on a 12-6 game-closing run.
“We could have made a couple more free throws, converted a couple more layups, but then fatigue set in,” Knights’ head coach Denzel Laguerta said, unmistakably fighting back his emotions. “But our guys really bought in and I couldn’t be more proud of the young men they are becoming.”
ANOTHER BRANCH ON THE NORTH SHORE COACHING TREE
Every region of the province has coaching trees with deep-rooted tradition.
And if the name Marco Fong isn’t familiar to local hoop heads, suffice to say, he has calmly and quietly, in a way befitting his manner, immersed himself in the craft of coaching for about the last decade.
Fong came of an age as a high school player in what was the most recent golden age for what is now the former North Shore zone.
Before reconfiguration to Vancouver Sea-to-Sky swallowed them up, the North Shore was its own unique world… a single-berth top-tiered zone with a play ‘em til you drop, true double-knockout zone championship.
And with that one berth per year, it produced the 2004 B.C. champion Argyle Pipers coached by Glen Chu and Peter Therrien, with stars like MVP Scott Morrison, Sinclair Brown and Sean Burke; and the 2006 Handsworth Royals coached by Randy Storey, with MVP Robert Sacre, and the likes of Scott Leigh and the late Quinn Keast.
Fong, a 2003 Handsworth graduate who was coached by Storey, played against the same Argyle players who a season later would win the B.C. title, and just over a decade later, found himself co-coaching the Argyle senior varsity with a man whom he credits for helping him find his way most in the field.
“As I got older and I started coaching, it was Peter Therrien of Argyle who really taught me a lot, and he’s somewhere out here supporting me tonight,” Fong, 39, said, pointing into the Arena Bowl stands after clipping the final strand on the winning net.
Therrien coached the Pipers senior varsity for the huge majority of a stretch running from 1982 to 2004, the latter Argyle’s championship season with Chu.
“He’s texted me all the time, he gives me support and encouragement,” added Fong, “and he tells me things I can do better with my strategy.”
Midway through the 2014-15 season, when Therrien stepped in to fill a vacancy that had popped up on the senior boys Argyle staff, he returned to his old team to find a 29 year-old Fong already on the coaching staff.
“He’s empathetic, and you can see in his interaction with his kids, he is very calm,” said Therrien, now 72. “He works well with kids… you can have all the talent in the world but if you can’t get it out of the kids, it doesn’t matter, And I think he got that out of them.”
The team he brought together?
Not completely anonymous as a pre-season No. 7 ranking would indicate, but by the time the final buzzer sounded, they suddenly looked like a perfect team.
Lukas Chung scored 14, but more than anything was the glue guy as the point guard who defined a true team mentality.
Martin Mosny, Xavian Washington and Joaquin Dharamsi didn’t score a point in the title game, but in their roles off the bench maintained everything that the starting unit established.
Rouillard, who scored a game-high 16, played at an MVP level in the team’s biggest games, his contributions at both ends of the floor felt due to the physicality and attack-minded purpose he never failed to bring.
Perrin Taylor?
The 6-foot-6, wingspan-laden senior, thrust himself front-and-centre into the scouting report of the Knights following his sublime 35-point, 20-rebounds effort the night previous in a semifinal win over Courtenay’s upstart Mark Isfeld Ice.
Is he the most under-appreciated superstar we’ve seen in recent memory?
“I honestly think so, and I think it’s because he is a soft-spoken, mild-mannered kind of guy,” said Fong, who is a little like that himself. “He is not rah-rah flashy. When he scores, he hustles back. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him celebrate a basket. I just hope that all of the hard work he put in, and us getting to this stage finally gets him recognized, and that some university coach will realize what kind of a special player he is.”
St. Thomas More got 11 points from Shane Deza, as well as nine points and a team-high 12 rebounds from Jacob Oreta.
A WOLF ANSWERS THE CALL
In every championship game, it seems, there is that one kid who, for any number of reasons, is the one in the starting group that is not primary on the opposition’s scouting report.
On Saturday night, with his team trying to build on a slim two-point (54-52) lead, Windsor’s Elias Neilson came off a letter-perfect double-screen set at the free throw line by teammates Taylor and Rouillard, and after taking a short pass from Chung just outside the top of the arc, unfurled a three-point attempt that ripped the mesh with 3:28 remaining and keyed the Wolves’ game-turning, game-closing 12-6 run.
“They were well-balanced and they had guys that were ready to step in,” said STM head coach Laguerta. “You know, 13 (Neilson) in the first half wasn’t making any shots, and then he steps up and we had to adjust. They are well coached, man they were awesome.”
“Stepping in as a Grade 11 with a very solid group of returning Grade 12s can be intimidating, but he played really big for us,” noted Fong of Neilson. “We noticed they were sagging off of him, and using his check to double Perrin, or to stop our dribble penetration. So I said ‘Hey, you got to be ready to shoot when the ball gets to you. It’s your time to shine.”
Bingo.
Neilson not only hit all three of his triples in the second half, he threw himself at the glass — at both ends — finishing with a game-high 14 rebounds, including six offensive.
“I was feeling it the whole game, and so I took my chances,” he said. “Coach tells me to shoot, and I’m a good shooter. I just looked for open shots.”
“When asked if he had any idea how many rebounds he finished with, Neilson responded “No, but I felt that I was doing lots of rebounds, though… Yeah?”
When told it was 14 with six offensive, he said: “Oh my goodness. For the defensive ones, my teammates are boxing out for me and they let me get in there for the easy ones. On offence, it’s just being in the right place, right time.”
And so as we re-visit our origin story, the one about a pack of young wolf cubs leaving the forest, and along their supernatural journey taking the form of a championship seniors boys basketball team, it begs an eternal question: Is fiction stranger than fact… or is fact indeed stranger than fiction?
When Fong and the Wolves accepted your author’s invitation to a spot in the Tsumura Basketball Invitational’s Select 16 bracket last December, then promptly lost their opening game to the Richmond Colts, they had dropped three straight games and were sporting a 1-3 record.
“They came out of nowhere,” said analyst Eberhardt afterwards. “You know, a lot of times when don’t have that single dominant player, when you maybe don’t play a super tough schedule… sometimes that comes back to haunt you. But they just better. With every tough game they played they just kept on getting better.”
Yet with its five football/soccer players having not had time to acclimate with the rest of the team until that first week of December, they got to start the campaign with a built-in level of anonymity that might have been more important than initially realized.
And so from a 1-3 record to start the season, the Wolves of Windsor went on an amazing 29-1 run to finish the season to finish 30-4. At the end of the season, no team in the province was hotter.
“The biggest thing was seeing their hard work pay off,” Fong said Saturday after the title was secured. “They worked tirelessly in the offseason. I pushed them as hard as I needed to in practice and they never complained. They just kept coming back for more.”
And before we all knew it, there they all were, fully formed and ready to perform Saturday night in front of a packed house at Arena Bowl. Ready to become B.C. champs.
It really made you ask ‘Hey where’d these guys come from?’
If you’re reading this story or viewing these photos on any website other than one belonging to a university athletic department, it has been taken without appropriate permission. In these challenging times, true journalism will survive only through your dedicated support and loyalty. VarsityLetters.ca and all of its exclusive content has been created to serve B.C.’s high school and university sports community with hard work, integrity and respect. Feel free to drop us a line any time at howardtsumura@gmail.com.
Wow! Another tour de force performance by Howard. And an annual pleasure for readers.
Tales told with grace, clarity and remarkable insight.
In a world in which journalism is rapidly disappearing, Howard remains a beacon. Speaking from personal experience, I have no idea how he doesn’t collapse in a state of exhaustion at the end of this marathon of toil.
BC hoops aficionados, you have no idea just how lucky you are. You owe him an enormous debt of gratitude!!!