VANCOUVER — Ask Kevin Hanson what he finds most special about his most recent high school recruit and he instantly captures the essence of St. Thomas More Knights’ senior Zeru Abera.
“It’s a tough thing to teach anyone how to be clutch in a basketball game, especially at the end of the game, and then to succeed at it… but he has,” the longtime UBC head coach said this past Friday of the 6-foot-3 guard whose aforementioned clutch-ness seems to reveal itself each and every time the Knights find themselves in a big-game situation.
“He knows he wants the ball in his hands and he also wants to be the guy that makes the stop, so I am really excited to see where he can get his game to at the post-secondary level,” continued Hanson of Abera (pronounced a-Bear-ah), who has averaged 28 points, six rebounds and five assists per game throughout a Grade 12 campaign that has just hit the post-season run to provincials for the Triple-A No. 3-ranked Knights.
“Of course I am always trying to be 100 per cent from the beginning (of a game) but when the situation is getting intense, I feel like that is when the best players have to rise to the occasion and just give that extra 10-or-20 per cent and do whatever you can,” said Abera, who had come to War Memorial Gym to watch what wound up being a scrappy 85-80 win by the ‘Birds over the UBC Okanagan Heat.
The Birds (26-5, 13-5) went on to top the Heat 105-79 the next night for a series sweep and wind up the Canadas West regular season this coming weekend in Prince George against the UNBC Timberwolves.
Abera’s senior season has done nothing but reinforce his unmistakable big-game DNA.
At the Tsumura Basketball Invitational over the first week of December at the Langley Events Centre, he helped cap the Knights’ ascent from No. 3 to No. 1 in the Triple-A rankings with back-to-back wins over Quad-A heavyweights St. George’s and Vancouver College.
Then, in the final, he faced none other than the then-Quad-A No. 2 Dover Bay Dolphins of Nanaimo who happened to be led by none other than fellow UBC Thunderbirds’ recruit Frank Linder.
St. Thomas More looked like they were going to give themselves a chance to be in position to potentially pull off a massive upset until Dover Bay went on a game-closing run.
Yet there is no question that in 2025-26, the two UBC rookies will reflect on that TBI title game, one in which Linder scored 33 points to lead his team while Abera scored 32 to lead his.
“He is really hard to guard because he likes to go one direction and then he shoots with the other hand,” Dover head coach Darren Seaman said in homage to Zeru afterwards. “It’s really hard to guard and that is why everybody has a lot of trouble with him. He’s smooth. He gets to the spot. He changes pace. He is a really skilled player. And tough.”
It doesn’t stop there.
At the end of the first weekend back from the holidays, in early January, Abera was still getting his basketball legs back after accompanying his mother on a trip to Ethiopia to visit family and reconnect with his African heritage.
Of course he was back in time for the Knights to play host to their annual Rich Goulet Chancellor Invitational, and come Saturday night in front of a capacity Kingsway campus crowd, Abera this time led his No. 1 Knights into battle against the No. 2 St. Patricks Celtics in the title game.
St. Pat’s went on to win 83-79, but not without perhaps the best Abera-fuelled comeback yet.
With 55 seconds left in the first half, STM trailed St. Pat’s 66-47.
In the second half, the Knights had closed to gap to within three points at 77-74, and of the 27 points they had scored in front of their delirious home crowd, 22 had come from Abera.
Hanson was coaching the Thunderbirds that evening at War Memorial, but he’s seen Abera enough to know exactly what his new recruit brings to just such situations.
“He’s shown championship traits in those late-quarter games so man times,” said Hanson. “So, so many times you see his team down a bit or struggling and he does whatever he has to. He scores a lot of points, but he is also unselfish at the same time. Then, all of a sudden he’s guarding on defence and his arms seem like they’re six-feet long. He’ll poke the ball out, get a steal, or get a rebound at just the right time.”
Of course his clutchness has not suddenly come to the fore.
Nowhere, perhaps, was it more impressive than in the 2023 B.C. junior boys championship final.
In one of the most dramatic B.C. boys or girls provincial championship finals of this century, want to wager a guess as to who hit the winning shot in the final three seconds of play as the No. 11-seeded Knights pulled out a 44-42 win against the No. 1-seeded Tamanawis Wildcats?
Your author was on the call of that game (see imbedded video above), and although it’s a recent one, it’s sure to be one of the personal highlights of my four-plus decades career reporting and broadcasting this beautiful game.
For his part, with the Fraser North playoffs at the fore as a potential prelude to the provincial championships March 5-8 at the Langley Events Centre, Abera has a lot else on his mind these days.
Yet graduation day with the rest of the Class of 2025 will be here sooner than he can know.
And from there, his own journey tom the next level will begin.
Ask Abera about what last Friday was about for him, to be in a gym in February with a live basketball game playing itself out in front of him, and he playing the rare role of spectator.
He undoubtedly envisioned himself in blue-and-gold next season, but more than anything he admitted he considered himself a young guy with a chance to be seated in a hoops classroom.
“I am always learning, because I am not a perfect player,” he said, fresh from posing for photos with Hanson, and his parents on the War Gym floor. “I am still in Grade 12 so I feel like there are so many, many things for me to learn.
“So whatever I can take from anyone, from a centre to a point guard… whatever it is, I’ll take anything I can learn and that I can apply to my own game.”
And what about the stuff that can’t be taught? You know, the clutch stuff?
For Zeru Abera, it seems the chances are on his side that with his brand of humility, hard work and determination he’ll get a chance to reach deep inside his bag and pull out a little something, something.
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