By Howard Tsumura
VANCOUVER — Thumb through the pages of Cerys Merton’s own basketball dictionary, and you’ll discover that the definition of the term ‘skill set’ includes at least one discipline not commonly clustered with the likes of the game’s time-honoured standards of shooting, passing and dribbling.
“I think the biggest thing is just constantly bringing that effort and work within practices and games because, you know, effort can be a talent sometimes, too,” explained Merton, a dyed-in-the-wool old-school hooper who has never missed a conference game over her first three-and-a-half U SPORTS seasons.
Spend any amount of time watching the UBC’s 5-foot-6 defensive dynamo at work, and her own brand of omnipresent on-ball effort most certainly manifests itself as a tangible skill for the No. 10-ranked Thunderbirds (6-4).
Heading into Friday’s 5:30 p.m. Canada West Pacific Division re-start weekend against Langley’s visiting, first-place Trinity Western Spartans (10-2) at War Memorial Gymnasium, Merton will assume her figurative ‘Pink Panther’ role for the 71st time in conference play as she builds on a level of thievery unprecedented in UBC women’s Canada West regular season basketball history.
Through 70 games in blue and gold, the Port Coquitlam native and Terry Fox Secondary grad has averaged 2.7 steals-per-game, the best in recorded team history (going back in some instances 38 years to 1987-88) as per Martin Timmerman’s usportshoops.ca website.
Currently, Merton’s 188 total steals have her tied with Cait Haggarty, the Victoria-Mt. Douglas star point guard whose incredible overall efficiency helped lead the Birds to Bronze Baby national crowns in 2004, 2006 and 2008.
Decorated former Birds’ star Carrie Watts (1999-2004), now the Victoria Vikes’ head coach, is second in team career steals per game with 2.4. Watts also sits second in team history with 210 individual steals, trailing only Kris Young (231 from 2010-15), the program’s all-time points leader, in total thefts.
If Merton is able to stay healthy and maintain her career-average pace over the remaining 30 games of her Canada West regular-season career, however, she would add another 81 steals and finish with a program record 269.
Yet if you know her, it’s a safe bet that she has no idea that she’s chiselled her way to such a lofty position within the team’s record columns.
“When it comes to my game, I’ve always just been an undersized guard, and you know, people kind of take me for granted because I’m maybe not a big scorer for the team,” says Merton who this season averages a most curious 3.1 points, 3.1 rebounds and 3.7 steals per game over 25.2 minutes per game, the steals total putting her second in the Canada West and eighth nationally. It’s also worth noting that while the conference season is only half over, her 3.7 SPG is also the best single-season average in recorded program history.
Here, however, it should be noted that box scores still do not chart such nuggets as pass deflections, hurried passes that lead to turnovers, and just a general level of opposition panic created, all the types of things Merton does on a regular basis, much to the delight of the basketball purist.
“I find my niche playing defence,” understates the player who came to the Point Grey campus for the 2022-23 season after having helped lead the Terry Fox Ravens to a B.C. junior title as a ninth grader in 2018-19 and a B.C. Quad-A title as a senior in 2021-22. “I think that is something that is so controllable for me… the effort that I bring to the court. I really strive to give 110 per cent each game. Some people like to dive on the ground, do those hustle plays. I really, really value that because it’s where I get my energy, and it’s my way of contributing to the team.”
“…LUCKILY, YOU CAN’T FOUL OUT AT PRACTICE”
Back in her elementary school days Cerys Merton seemed to have her mind made up that she was going to be a soccer player.
Yet when Teena Frost saw her traits of tenacity revealed on the pitch, it wasn’t too much of a stretch for the former Simon Fraser guard to realize that Merton could also have a future on the hardwood.
Merton had already struck up a friendship with Frost’s daughter Kianna, who herself had begun to gravitate to the court, and it wasn’t too long before co-coaches Frost and Mike Carkner found themselves staring at the kind of team whose potential would in fact be realized throughout their high school age-group years at the aforementioned junior and senior high school levels.
“Kianna reminded me of this funny story recently,” Frost said in reflection when queried as to the defence-above-everything origin story of Cerys Merton.
“She went through six or seven pairs of knee pads every season,” Frost related with a kind of mirthful admiration. “She had to wear them in practice because she made things so intense. And the stuffing would be coming out of them. They’d be ripped and she’d be pushing the stuffing back in because, you know, she’d already gone through two pairs in a month.”
As Frost continues to speak about Merton, it’s clear that the mindset that would serve her so well at UBC was borne on the practice floor at Terry Fox.
“She’s a coach’s dream because she never stops,” said Frost. “She set the tone for us beginning in practice and we were a super-competitive group, but (Merton) would never let anyone get an open lay-up. Luckily you can’t foul out at practice.”
These days it seems as if virtually nothing about Merton’s mindset has changed, despite the fact that at the U SPORTS level, she’s virtually the shortest player on the court every time she steps between the lines.
Calling herself ‘undersized’, she has nonetheless transformed herself in the weight room, and when you couple that with the tenacity she’s always brought, it’s almost like she’s flipped the script on whomever she winds up guarding.
In fact it’s apparent enough that, dare we say, in her fourth year she has become something of an intimidating force on the floor?
To borrow from the parlance of the gridiron game, you might even say that when she gets in a stance and squares up, it almost feels like she’s lowering her ‘pad level’.
“We have a performance staff who definitely have helped me build my strengths,” she says of a department headed up by strength and conditioning guru Joe McCullum. “I remember looking back at photos from my first year and not having very much muscle on my bones.
“I think just being able to, you know, kind of use that intimidation factor on defence definitely helps,” she adds. “And to be honest, I kind of like that reputation of people being scared to play against me. I think that gets me going… you know, wanting to, like, quite frankly, piss people off on defence. That gets me going.”
DEFINING EFFORT AS A SOUL INSPIRATION
As we eluded to earlier, players cut from the same cloth as Merton — great past and present UBC backcourt defenders not known first for their scoring prowess like Candace Morisset and current Birds’ fifth-year senior Sara Toneguzzi — never wind up getting their proper due in a standard box score.
As it pertains to Merton, UBC’s veteran first-year head coach Dave Taylor has very quickly come to appreciate the blank Scrabble chip presence that his fourth-year guard brings to the dance.
“She’s just a menace defensively, and it’s not just the full court, which people notice, like her picking up full court and getting some steals that way, but she is so good off ball,” begins Taylor. “And where she’s actually really underrated, is she’ll often get a steal a game just going down and doubling the post… just being there on the double. As soon as a post puts the ball down, she’s right there.”
There is also a great case to be made for the ways in which Merton is able to put her anticipatory skills to use in key situations.
“She’s a very versatile defender because you can do a couple of things with her,” states Taylor. “Sometimes you put her on the other team’s best offensive guard, just to do that. But sometimes you also have the ability to go ‘Hey, we’re actually going to put you over on this player, so you can run out and basically, you know, be the Larry Bird of years gone by where you’re you’re looking to pick off stuff’ because (she has) just a high basketball IQ.’”
(Editor’s note — watch the video below for the perfect example. Your author can tell you it is the most heartbreaking moment in Detroit Pistons’ history. It still hurts to this day although the play of the 2025-26 team is making up for some of that!)
With losses to both Victoria and UBC Okanagan, as well as a two-game sweep at the hands of No. 1-ranked Saskatchewan over the first half of the season, this weekend’s back-to-back games against the Spartans (women 4 p.m., men 6 p.m. Saturday at War Memorial) take on an even greater level of urgency.
For Cerys Merton, it’s another chance to inhale all that is great about a return to conference play.
She’s learned how to care for a body she has put through a figurative obstacle course for the better part of the last decade, and majoring Kinesiology has brought her studies in the classroom into lockstep with her evolution on the basketball court.
The love she has for her teammates is unquestioned, and her gratitude for all of those whose paths she’s crossed since first learning the tenets of the defensive stance continue to populate her thoughts.
Ask her about that and she decides it’s time to bare a little of her soul.
“I’ve had so many great coaches who have definitely influenced the importance of defence, but I think when it comes down to my work ethic, it comes down to Karin Khuong and her battle with cancer,” Merton said of her former teammate at Terry Fox who battled the disease with the utmost courage and dignity for two years before passing away in October of 2020 at the age of 16.
“I think she really inspires me in the way that no matter the challenges that she was facing, she was always bringing in her all, you know, bringing a positive attitude and to go into those challenges with as much effort as you can,” continued Merton of Khuong, who throughout her treatments attended both games and practices and in the midst of her struggle, then put on the Ravens’ jersey for the final time when she made a return to the floor during the 2020 B.C. championships.
“I think that’s really the lesson that I learned from her passing. You know, you can control your effort and the attitude that you bring, and I really carry that with me to this day.”
It’s why when Cerys Merton tells you that ‘effort’ needs to be classified as a ‘talent’ you can do nothing else but clap your hands.
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