By Howard Tsumura
Varsity Letters
VANCOUVER — “Run it with a long lens.”
That’s the answer Phil Jalalpoor received before he began his maiden journey last season as the first new UBC men’s head basketball coach in a quarter of a century.
“That was the question I asked in the beginning… what’s the approach here?” Jalalpoor told Varsity Letters in reminiscence, just ahead of a recent practice in preparation for Thursday’s Canada West conference opener at home Thursday (7:30 p.m.) against Langley’s Trinity Western Spartans.
Elevated from assistant coach to interim head coach, Jalalpoor last season inherited, among others, five battled-tested seniors, a key third-year player, a blossoming second-year star and questions surrounding the availability of minutes for four promising freshmen.
“It’s my core belief that’s how you run a program… to kind of continue to develop (young) guys and set it up for the long term and they were like ‘Yeah, run it with a long lens,’” continued Jalalpoor, the 33-year old who had worn the blue-and-gold for three seasons as a point guard as part of the 25-year run of legendary former head coach Kevin Hanson. In his own head coaching debut last season, Jalalpoor led UBC to a 15-5 Canada West record, a berth in the conference championship game and a spot at the U SPORTS Final 8 national championships.
“I think it was getting a bit of feedback to do it that way, but then also just my belief in what I grew up on,” he added, citing mentors like Hanson and Olli Renck, the latter a key coaching figure throughout his formative years back in his native Germany who implored him to be a “constant learner.”
In April, Jalalpoor was named the program’s full-time head coach and now that ‘long lens’ approach has been allowed to zoom in just a little tighter, revealing the bones of a rebuild that he feels might be a little ahead of its intended schedule.
NYLAN ROBERTS: “…HE’S A BIT OF A UNICORN”
Everything about Nylan Roberts’ career has been a study in consistent improvement.
Last season, as a 6-foot-7 forward out of Abbotsford’s Yale Secondary, Roberts had moved into the starting lineup by late November and never left, capping off his second Canada West campaign with an 18-point, 10-rebound, five-assist outing in the ‘Birds final game of the season, an 83-75 loss to Laval in the second round of the national championships.
The momentum continued to build for Roberts throughout the offseason, highlighted by his time spent representing Canada at the FIBA 3×3 Youth Nations League in Paraguay, an environment where his speed, power and acceleration were allowed to come to the fore in the open floor.
It all added up to five starts over UBC’s 5-1 exhibition season, time on task as the team’s go-to leader in which Roberts seemingly did it all, averaging team highs with 18.6 points, 6.2 rebounds and 2.0 steals over 28.6 minutes while shooting .362 (17-of-47) from beyond the arc in the process.
“He’s a bit of a unicorn in the sense he’s on top of everything that he does,” says Jalalpoor. “He’s our guy that’s probably the most professional on school. He just kind of has that professional mindset. He showed everything last year. He can score at all three levels, and I think dominate defensively. The biggest step now is can you do it being the main guy on the scouting report? Can you do it with more minutes… to essentially play like a walk-on the entire time, to have that kind of mentality.”
Jalalpoor adds that while his conversations with Roberts over his first two seasons centred around him coming off the bench behind an older group of players, what was left to evolve organically was his willingness to embrace the coaching staff’s player development, and how that would allow him to take full ownership of his potential.
It’s clear today that Roberts never skipped a beat.
“And obviously he played for his dad and he did a great job of kind of letting him play all positions,” Jalalpoor said of Euan Roberts, these days the longtime head coach of Abbotsford’s Yale Secondary Lions, and in the mid-1990s himself a 6-foot-7 forward who helped lead the Brandon Bobcats to the 1996 CIAU national title.
“If you see (Nylan) now, he’s kind of getting g back to that now,” Jalalpoor adds. Euan Roberts is sure to be in the stands Saturday (6 p.m.) when Nylan and the Thunderbirds travel to Abbotsford to face a Fraser Valley Cascades team featuring his younger brother, rookie forward Taige Roberts.
Yet Roberts’ value to the Thunderbirds program goes beyond what he will provide on a game-night basis in the box score because this season there are no fifth-year players on the UBC roster.
To that end, Roberts and 6-foot-8 fourth-year forward Karan Aujla, as the team’s established returning veterans, will share a leadership role Jalalpoor is confident both are ready to handle.
“That’s one of the parts I love most… that this year Nylan is a captain with Karan, and in sports, captains are everything. They kind of dictate a lot of performance.
“It’s one position that I think is sometimes more important than that of coach,” chuckles Jalalpoor. “Sometimes we have to admit to that.”
When asked what strengths Roberts will bring to that role, his head coach doesn’t hesitate.
“We have lost our entire starting five from last season,” Jalalpoor reminds of the group that started for the first half of last season. “(But) we are further ahead than we thought we’d be because Nylan has that standard of just being a phenomenal teammate. In practice, he’s going at everybody and saying like ‘We’re not friends today. We can be friends after practice.’ He’s phenomenal.”
Aujla has also been a part of the foundation, and he was effective in the preseason shooting almost 70 per cent from the floor, averaging 11.3 points and 5.3 rebounds in 24.5 minutes per game.
Other veterans include a pair of transfer from Simon Fraser in 6-foot-6 fourth-year redshirt forward Immanuel Oludele and third-year forward Roko Maric, the latter now joining older brother and newly-installed assistant coach Toni Maric after the pair of Vancouver College grads opposed each other two seasons ago in the most recent Buchanan Cup meeting.
As well, third-year 6-foot-8 forward Jacob Antchak, a Langley-Walnut Grove product, returns to bolster the front court pack.
THE FOUR FRESHMEN (FROM 2025-26)
Freshmen guards don’t normally stroll into the Canada West and hit the three-ball with what we’re guessing is an efficiency rating that rivals their high school playing days.
That kind stuff usually takes some time if it happens at all.
Yet while the lights are decidedly brighter at the U SPORTS level, UBC’s aforementioned trio of Messrs Dhadda (40-of-102, .392), Gauthier (36-of-102, .353) and a lower-volume but still successful Abera (13-of-38, .342) proved somewhat immune to all that accompanies an elevated hardwood stage.
Last season, the trio went a combined 89-of-242 from three-point distance, good enough for a healthy .368 per cent success rate. By comparison, the rest of a veteran-heavy UBC team went 167-of-526 for a significantly lower .318 per cent, and that latter figure includes a then-second-year Roberts, who was an eagle-eyed .370 while hitting at a 50-for-135 clip.
And all of that is to say nothing about the overall numbers the frosh trio put up despite combining for exactly zero starts on the season.
Gauthier averaged 9.5 points, Dhadda 6.7 and Abera 4.7. In the preseason Gauthier had pushed that average to 16.0 points, Abera to 10.6 points while Dhadda sat at 4.6 points.
The most easily relatable numbers are obviously never the most telling, yet they do paint a picture of a trio that in many respects arrived before their time.
And then there’s the fourth member of that 2025-26 freshman class: Frank Linder.
The unquestioned star of his Dover Bay Secondary team in Nanaimo through his 2025 graduation, Linder was a plumb recruit for a Birds’ program able to keep the Vikes from making a clean sweep of what was as generationally-deep a graduating class of high school seniors as the capital city has ever seen.
So why didn’t Linder also play last season?
The long lens, of course.
“It was a conversation last year because he was good enough,” acknowledged Jalalpoor of Linder, perhaps most naturally a 3-4 hybrid forward with plenty of guard skills. “(But) after a few weeks of practice, we were very deep on that position with Toni (Maric) there and with Nylan because he’s a 3-4, but then even with Tobi (Akinkumni) who could kind of go 3-4, and (Linder’s) just like, ‘You know, I will focus on my development this year.’”
Fast forward to the final three games of UBC’s exhibition schedule and there was Linder averaging 24 minutes per game against Alberta, Windsor and McMaster, and in each game finding his stride offensively with carbon-copy 5-for-7 shooting efforts, scoring 12, 11 and 11 points respectively to set up his first-ever Canada West regular season game Thursday.
“He’s obsessed and he’s a workhorse, and he’s incredible,” said Jalalpoor. “He took advantage of that player-development framework, got a lot better, and what you saw from him in high school, now he just kind of brings that to the court. That’s a big part of our philosophy… just intensity on each possession. He’s obsessed. He loves it.”
Rounding out the rest of the active roster are second-year transfer Jakob Vigneault, a 6-foot-4 guard from Montreal who spent last season playing at the NCAA Division. 2 level for the Mississippi College Choctaws of the Gulf South Conference; Blake Pye, a 6-foot-2 guard from Victoria’s Lambrick Park Secondary; and Anas Rezk, a 6-foot-5 first-year guard from Alexandria, Egypt. Rezk has prior experience playing for the Egyptian Under-18 national team.
This season’s two redshirts are 6-foot-7 rising third-year forward Marcus Flores, the former Semiahmoo standout who transferred from Fraser Valley, and 6-foot-5 guard John Anthony who helped Vancouver College win the 2026 B.C. Quad-A championship title last March.
THE FOUNDATION HAS BEEN POURED
All Phil Jalalpoor has known — both as a UBC player and as a coach — is winning.
Over his three seasons as a point guard (2015-18), on teams coached by Hanson and including notable teammates like Conor Morgan and Jordan Jensen-Whyte, UBC went a combined 52-7 in Canada West conference games.
In his two seasons coaching, as an assistant under Hanson in 2024-25 and then last season as the interim head coach, the ‘Birds went a combined 30-10.
And when you ask him about the mentorship he received from Hanson, he is quick to speak to the importance that was placed on the long lens.
“I think that is credit to Coach Kev, when he brought me back,” Jalalpoor remembers of reuniting with Hanson in the fall of 2024 after six seasons spent overseas playing professionally.
“He trusted me right away to put this player development scheme in place. And now the credit goes through my lead assistant Jacob (Simmons) who has kind of taken it to the next level in combination with the best strength coach in Canada in Joe (McCullum).
“I think we have such a strong player development framework,” he continues. “We trust the guys because they really do take steps really quickly and we pride ourselves in trying to develop better than anybody else.”
With 10 of its 12 rostered players either first-, second- or third-year players, and with no fifth-year players to speak of this season, it’s no stretch to say that this is a Thunderbirds team ready to trust what the long lens is showing them.
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