By HOWARD TSUMURA
(Varsity Letters)
(Quick links to all four championship draw included below)
LANGLEY — On the night before the start of the 79th annual B.C. senior boys basketball tournament, as 64 teams spread out over four tiers take their championship dreams to bed for one more sleep, we thought we’d go straight to the source for some simple but essential advice.
Ken Shields, of course, was the architect behind the first true dynasty in what is now known as U SPORTS basketball when he guided the Victoria Vikes to seven straight national titles.
Yet talk to Shields enough and you detect a clear connection between the lessons he learned as a member of the 1964 Prince Rupert Rainmakers B.C. high school champions and the ones he would later go on to impart as the head coach at UVic.
The question is simple, and his answers are designed as much to reinforce what, in almost every instance, is the difference between winning and losing over the four days of sudden championship elimination at the Langley Events Centre.
“I’d be stressing what the coaches stressed with us,” Shields told Varsity Letters as part of a wide-ranging interview last month.
“We were the fittest team in the province and we played probably the best defence of any team in the province,” he continued.
“Those are the things that a coach can control,” he continued. “You have very few things that you have absolute control over.
“You have control over how fit your team is, and you have more control on defence than you do on offence because you don’t have the ball. You’re playing against the ball.
No one is telling you to ignore the offence.
But the fittest team, that plays the toughest defence?
That is the last team you want to face in the final few minutes of any of this Sunday’s four B.C. championship games.
Of course when the Norm Vickery-coached Rainmakers won it all in 1964 at what was the 19th annual B.C. championship, there was only one tier.
And Shields and his teammates won their final three games by a total of five points, culminating with a 43-41 win over Abbotsford.
Those razor-thin margins have never left Shields’ memory, even as the 19th championships give way Wednesday to what are now the 79th championships.
And that’s why when he talks about fitness and defence, he’s not talking about the first quarter or the first half, he’s talking about the entire game, and especially the final half of the fourth quarter when it becomes easier and easier to see who prepared, and who did not.
“Five guys playing against the ball and it’s team defence,” added Shields. “So if you’re really good at it, you create havoc for the other team… if you are really, really tough defensively. You give yourself a chance in every game.”
When Saturday night rolls around, the chances are overwhelmingly good that the four new B.C. champions crowned will have made these two staples the core of their identity.
THE 79TH ANNUAL B.C SENIOR BOYS CHAMPIONSHIPS
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