By Howard Tsumura
LANGLEY — The Trinity Western Spartans did not qualify for last season’s U SPORTS women’s national championship tournament held across town at UBC.
Yet none of that means the Spartans went into this past off-season unaware of what it’s like to play the country’s best with both team’s seasons on the line.
“We played Saskatchewan to finish our season last year and it gave us a glimpse of what the top team in the country is going to look like,” TWU veteran head coach Cheryl-Jean Paul explained earlier this month of her team’s decisive 83-57 Canada West quarterfinal round loss last March in Saskatoon to a Huskies team which would cap a 30-2 season by winning its last 24 straight games, including an 85-66 victory over Carleton in the national final.
“We don’t want to shy away from those games and we don’t want the first time we experience that level of play to be in a game that determines whether our season finishes or not, so we are trying to get into some of those kinds of competitive situations against teams that could well be at nationals and are national-calibre programs because that is who we want to compare ourselves to,” added Jean-Paul, who begins her 16th campaign at the helm as Trinity Western opens the 2025-26 Canada West season this weekend with back-to-back games against the Pacific Division’s two most tradition-laden programs. The Spartans play at the Victoria Vikes on Friday (5:30 p.m.) before returning home Saturday (6 p.m.)to host the UBC Thunderbirds at the Langley Events Centre.
To clarify context, Jean-Paul’s comments came in the moments following her team’s season-opening non-conference 59-47 loss to the OUA’s Queen’s Gaels at the Langley Events Centre back on Oct. 2.
That was a game in which the Spartans built an early 10-point lead and led 32-24 at the half, but it was also one in which its young-and-rising core of main rotation players were unable to meet the challenge of the more-veteran Gaels’ determined second-half effort.
So now, after a 2-4 preseason which saw wins over both Manitoba (68-53) and MacEwan (67-36) bookend competitive losses to Alberta (64-56), Queen’s, Mt. Royal (64-62) and Regina (69-60), Trinity Western heads into what can best be described as an identity-defining Canada West season.
Gone from last season’s team, which went 10-10 in Canada West, is lead guard Shemaiah Abatayo, the former Vancouer-Britannia standout who led the Spartans in scoring (13.2 ppg) last season before moving on to the Philippines where she has begun to find a starring niche at Manila’s Far Eastern University.
And so as the process of defining newer roles for the returning core meshes with the arrival of a small but impactful class of freshmen, as well as talented fourth-year transfer guard Myrlaine Shelvey (fourth-year, Simon Fraser, Langley Christian), it’s not surprising that a clear picture of these 2025-26 Spartans has yet to come into focus.
HOW THE CANADA WEST’S CHANGE IN SCHEDULING FORMAT HAS TOUGHENED TEAMS
For her part, Jean-Paul can’t help but proffer the challenging nature of back-to-back games to open the season against her program’s top two longest provincial rivals as a kind of gritty exercise whose dividends won’t be known until those tense days of February and March.
Last season, the Canada West introduced format changes aimed to place added emphasis on geographic rivalries, resulting in the Pacific Division’s seven women’s and men’s basketball schools (all from B.C.) playing each other three times apiece instead of just twice.
While two of those three games are still being contested as back-to-back Friday-Saturday games in the same host city, the remaining single games against the conference’s six teams are now in their second season of being staged outside of that long-standing format, most commonly as home-and-away or back-to-back on the road. Each team also plays a two-game weekend set against one team from the Prairie division to round out the 20-game regular season.
In men’s and women’s play this weekend, as an example, UBC hosts Fraser Valley, and Victoria hosts Trinity Western on Friday, while on Saturday Trinity Western hosts UBC, and Fraser Valley welcomes Victoria.
After what seemed like decades of near-exclusive back-to-back Friday-Saturday games against the same team in the same city, the newer format has forced coaches to adopt a new reality in terms of both preparation and travel.
In Jean-Paul’s case, she has presented the newer weekends to her team as a test of their ability to overcome additional adversities in the same kinds of scenarios they may find themselves in later on in the season, perhaps in the sudden-elimination atmosphere of the conference’s play-off rounds.
“Having to play UBC and Vic home-and-away or playing at Fraser Valley and then travelling to play UBC-O (in Kelowna the next day) in some of those modified weekends, it doesn’t take much to look at how much more challenging it can be, but I also know that any coach that looks at the situation has two choices,” she begins.
“We can lament about it and complain about it, or we can look at it and say ‘Our playoff format still has a play-in game, and then a quarterfinal game against a team that is rested’, so if we ever get into that situation like we did last year, where we played Mount Royal on Friday, then Saskatchewan on Saturday (both in Saskatoon), the only way to be ready for that kind of game is how we prepare for the UBC-Vic weekend, or the UFV-UBC-Okanagan weekend where we are playing at UFV on Friday and then bussing up to UBC-O and playing them the next day.”
The top seven teams from the Prairie Division and the top 5 from the Pacific Division qualify for Canada West single-elimination playoffs.
The top four teams receive opening-round byes while teams 5-through-12 meet in opening round play-in games with the winners advancing to the quarterfinals.
WHAT OPENING WEEKEND WILL REVEAL
Where are the Spartans at when it comes to measuring their overall experience to that of their first two foes at Victoria and UBC?
TWU is closer in overall experience to Victoria, yet the Vikes do boast three fifth-years including 6-foot-4 centre Abigail Becker and 6-foot forward Mimi Sigue. TWU’s only fifth-year player is forward Gracie Corneau.
Perhaps no team in the country has as much experience as UBC, which is coming off a top four finish at nationals and boasts six fifth-years including Olivia Weekes and newcomer Jaeli Ibbetson.
“You talk about the 100’s of games of experience that three of four of them have,” Jean-Paul began, referencing a recent story at VarsityLetters.ca which spoke to the veteran make-up of this season’s UBC team.
“When you look at where UBC was three-to-four-to-five years ago with that group, I mean, it was younger players in bigger roles trying to figure things out,” she continues, correctly identifying expectations that Thunderbirds veterans like Sara Toneguzzi, Stella LaGrange and Cerys Merton among others faced on a night-to-night basis.
“In terms of having to pay your dues, I look at (who we’re) playing this weekend and (Victoria’s) Abigail Becker has paid her dues, and (UBC’s) Olivia Weekes has paid her dues,” she says of a pair of the conference’s top fifth-year seniors and cornerstone performers. “They have been there before in close finishes, close losses, those almost-there-but-not-quite games, and you can only get better if you approach it the right way.”
While the entire Trinity Western roster has returned sans Abatayo, and has been bolstered by a small but promising incoming class including guards Mavleen Chahal (Kelowna) and Lola Reimer (Abbotsford-ME) and forward Moriah Jansen (Salmon Arm-King’s Christian), roles have had to be re-adjusted.
Much of the team’s success is sure to be tied to the fortunes of fourth-year players like guards Cassidy Buchanan (Langley-Brookswood), and the Langley Christian pair of SFU transfer Myrlaine Shelvey (Langley Christian), and Sydney Bradshaw (Langley Christian); third-year post Blessing Ibekwe (Coquitlam-Centennial), and powerful second-year guard Colette Van der Hoven (Langley Christian).
Savannah Vander Kooi (third-year, Chilliwack-Unity Christian), as well two other MEI products — fifth-year Gracie Corneau and fourth-year Jazmin Avila — along with second-year Joy Mofolasayo (Edmonton-Louis St. Laurent) are also a part of the ever-evolving active roster.
Week 1 of the conference season is the starting point from which every team in U SPORTS will measure its progress on the potential road to March Madness.
Trinity Western is just one of the teams set to begin the process of finding their identity.
And if Jean-Paul is confident of one thing, it’s that her players will not remain static in their development over the course of 20 conference games.
“One of the things our program has done well with is that the Spartans team you play in October and November is probably not going to be the same team you see in January and February,” she says. “We keep pushing every athlete into a development space, and so if we play Victoria and UBC and there are deficits revealed in the game, our objective as a coaching staff is that as much as we are beating each other up, we are still working towards a playoff spot.”
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