By HOWARD TSUMURA
Varsity Letters
LANGLEY — High school reunions of any magnitude aren’t supposed to happen until at least a decade after graduation.
Yet on Saturday night at the Langley Event Centre, it was pretty hard to deny the fact that North Vancouver’s Argyle Pipers were going to try and sneak an extra one in about four months ahead of June’s graduation ceremony.
And who could blame them?
After all, was there any single class in which this senior-laden group had spent more time together while learning a lot of life lessons along the way than after 3 p.m. in the gym under the watchful eye of head coach Anthony Beyrouti and his dedicated staff of assistants?
And against all odds, wasn’t that their Grade 11 teammate Maaria Maydan, the 6-foot forward and last season’s leading scorer who had broken her foot over half of a year ago and had not seen any action with the Pipers until receiving cautious clearance to join her senior-laden teammates Wednesday?
It was all about being together for one last shot together at taking home all of the spoils after two seasons of failing up to their pre-tournament seeding.
And for that to happen, sometimes you just have to be patient and let the universe work in its own mysterious ways.
Or as 6-foot-5 senior post Eva Woodward explained after her team’s dominant 72-41 win Saturday night over PoCo’s talented but young Riverside Rapids, “our coach tells us that nothing is ever promised. Pressure is a privilege and you know, we just have to embrace this moment and be grateful with where we are.”
That, of course, within the din of the LEC’s Arena Bowl, was a shared place not on a stage with a cap and gown, but on one they could rightly say was at the top of the B.C. basketball world.
“He just told us to have get gritty and play are hearts out, too,” added Woodward, herself a near-complete basketball neophyte in the eighth grade when she was recruited by her coaches after being spotted at the school by her coaches.
“We got her in the hallways and we turned her into as player, and from Grade 8 on she just got better and better every year, and before you know it know it, she’s one of the best players in the province” said Beyrouti, happy to trace the origins and super-powers of each and every one of his players upon request.
Saturday’s game was the most lopsided top-tiered B.C. senior girls final this century outside of powerhouse Semiahmoo’s 114-62 title-game win over Terry Fox in 2020.
Having Maydan back, and in turn putting on a show of absolute lock-down defence in the paint with its quartet of bigs and its deep-and-talented guard group, Argyle went with a 10-player main rotation of which eight were seniors, before the benches of both teams took to the floor over the final five minutes of play.
TRACING ORIGIN STORIES OF ONE TALL FRONT COURT
From the moment you saw these assembled Pipers on the court two seasons ago as a largely 10th-grade team, it was impossible to miss the stature and the length of its rising Class of 2026 talent.
Yet the tears of joy you saw Saturday night in the post-game celebration were flowed as much because they were not an overnight sensation.
In 2024, as the No. 2 seed, it was an upset loss in the quarterfinals to the Yale Lions of Abbotsford.
And then last season, and epic late collapse led to the No. 1-seeded Pipers falling to No. 4 Brookswood of Langley.
And it looked like it was going to happen all over again in last Thursday’s quarterfinals before senior guard Cassidy Nugent’s huge three-pointer proved 11th-hour balm as No. 1 Argyle pulled a 73-71 win out of the fire against Kelowna’s No. 8-seed Okanagan Mission Huskies.
“After that, I think the girls were very locked in,” Beyrouti said. “They played a lot of selfless basketball the rest of the way.”
Which is precisely what their head coach had stressed all along was the one element holding them back from putting forth performances like the one it unfurled against Riverside on Saturday.
(At this point, credit must be given where it’s due, because having a full box score, one that accurately ventures deep into the numbers, is what allow us to speak confidently with the backing you need to base sound foundational elements of your story upon. It was the same for reporters last Friday when they were able to credit a rare steps, assists, points triple-double to Riverside’s Francesca Salonga. And so out thanks to statisticians Sophie Depelteau and Hayley Burch who were a massive help to both Varsity Letters in the production of our championship stories, and to the broadcast team of myself and analyst Cheryl Jean-Paul on TFSETV.ca).
So what did this box score tell us?
Most incredibly that Argyle’s senior-laden team outscored Riverside’s largely Grade 9-11 roster by a whopping count of 54-8 in the points scored in the paint.
Argyle went 27-of-44 (61.4 per cent) in the paint, while Riverside was limited to just four inside buckets (4-for-24, 16.7 per cent) the entire game.
It was the kind stat that could cure a whole lot of other ills, like the fact the Pipers shot a dreadful 3-for-22 from outside the arc on the night.
“They’re big, they’re great,” said losing coach Paul Langford afterwards, the veteran skipper with the magic touch having, since the 2021-22 return from COVID has led his team to appearances in now four of the last five championship finals, with a mere Final Four appearance in the other. “And no excuses we had Grade 9s and 10s. They have been in the weight room. Our girls are going to realize that they have to get into the weight room, too. But we were troopers. They make an old railroader pretty happy.”
Just where Argyle sits in terms of the largest starting lineups in tourney history is up for debate. There are not enough records in the archives for anything absolute.
Yet in the 6-foot-5 Woodward, the 6-foot-2 Sophie Nicholson, and the 6-foot pair of Isabella Miljkovic and Maydan, the combination of their physicality and their varied athletic gifts was simply too much for the young Rapids to cope with just yet, given the wattage of the light bulbs in the barn and the court’s rarified elevation above sea level.
All tolled, Argyle’s front court quartet combined for 60 of their teams 72 points, on 25-of-41 (61 per cent) shooting.
All were able to score inside and battle for second-chance opportunities (a 28-13 advantage), their overall success in the paint due as much to their varied individual strengths as anything else.
Born in Hawaii to parents of Serbian heritage, Miljkovic, picked the TBI MVP back when the same two teams met in December’s Super 16 final, earned the same honour again as the B .C. championship MVP, scoring a game-high 19 points to go along with 10 rebounds and five steals.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment for four years, and it’s mind blowing,” she explained. “I can’t even cry right now, I’m so happy.”
Every bit a guard, but able to morph into the kind of player who can embrace a front court defensive assignment, she was the veteran presence assigned to slow Riverside’s up-and-coming Grade 9 star Ari Brown on a night when no Rapids player scored into double digits with the exception of Grade 11 forward Henna Virk (10).
Then there’s the 6-foot-2 Nicholson.
“Sophie… gangly arms when she was young but she has come together and this weekend she was unbelievable,” said Beyrouti of a player who still has a huge ceiling. Nicholson had 10 points, nine rebounds, four assists and three steals in 24 minutes… and she clearly understands the value she can bring with her medium-range shooting game.
And then there’s the 6-foot Maydan, whose twin brother Ilia will play at the boys senior provincials beginning this weekend with Argyle.
The Maydans arrived in North Vancouver from the Ukraine in 2022, and Mariia has been a standout on the B.C. hard courts from the moment she arrived.
Yet her Grade 11 season has been one that has tested her to the core.
Suffering a fractured left foot, an injury similar to the one which robbed the senior season of 2025 championship game MVP Camryn Tait of Seaquam, Beyrouti has said in mid-February that he was not sure Maydan would be back and ready to join her teammates in time for provincials.
By Saturday night, after slicing down the winning net, he seemed logically awed by what had just happened.
“Until this week, she hadn’t played since July when she got hurt,” said the coach. “She played in one of our playoff games to get into provincials, then before we played her tonight, she had played in the first game at provincials, sat out the second to prevent overuse (against OKM), and since then she’s been awesome.
“When we added her for the tournament we knew it would make a huge difference,” he added after Maydan totalled 18 points, and nine rebounds, five coming coming off the offensive glass.
“I’m just so blessed to be here,” she said. “Doctors told me I had a stress fracture and I just prayed I would be back one day, and thank God”
ALL POINTS NORTH
And with all of that height, isn’t the final piece of the puzzle a pure point guard?
The truly selfless ones are getting harder and harder to find these days, ones willing to reframe their egos in a way that making others better becomes their greatest satisfaction.
Sadie Danks is that player.
Headed to join the U Sports Final 8-bound UBC Thunderbirds next season on the Point Grey campus, there was something about the fact that she was scoreless yet still indispensable in Saturday’s final.
That’s a true point guard.
“I know my role and I am proud of what I do, and I know my teammates are proud of me,” said Danks who stuffed the stat sheet with eight assists, seven rebounds, five steals, a block and tied for her team’s second-highest plus-minus with Miljkovic at plus-20 (Maydan plus-23).
Nugent, the other starting guard, added seven points and brought her usual energy and tempo to the proceedings.
And while we’re talking about guards, that’s the position the Pipers head coach Beyrouti played, coming off the bench as sixth man for North Vancouver’s St. Thomas Aquinas Fighting Saints back in the day.
Beyrouti helped lead STA to the 2003 B.C. Single-A title as the Saints topped Penticton’s Princess Margaret Mustangs 79-60 in the final.
“There is a poster of us up in the banquet hall at the LEC,” Beyrouti states, poking fun at himself in the process. “It’s up there on the wall. There’s evidence.”
There’s also pretty big clue how much love he holds for the game despite the successes and the demands of his entrepreneurial ventures.
Now age 41, Beyrouti got the coaching bug early and for the last 24 years has not stopped.
“When I was in high school, my co-vice principal Chris Campbell, he let me coach the Grade 8 girls basketball team with him. I haven’t stopped since.”
Beyrouti later yo-yo’ed back in force with two separate coaching stints each with girls teams at both STA and Argyle.
In 2016, he led his first team to a B.C. title, as the Pipers, led by a 41-point performance by future SFU Red Leafs guard Georgia Swant, topped Langley’s Walnut Grove Gators in the the B.C. junior girls championship final.
After Saturday’s win over Riverside, he gave Rapids’ coach Paul Langford, a personal friend and club coaching compadre, a warm greeting, later calling Langford one of this province’s true great coaches.
When asked for a follow-up, Beyrouti replied on Sunday morning: “Paul and I were just chatting. He’s has an open gym every Sunday, even today. I will not be in a gym under any circumstance.
“And 10 years ago we created a club, VK Basketball’s and last night there were 25 players from the club playing in that (championship) game.”
Basketball coaches do a lot of things, and maybe the most important is the way they help create self-sustaining basketball communities.
And for their student-athletes, they the starting point of social circles that last a lifetime.
If you ever wondered how strong those ties were this season on the Argyle Pipers, all you had to do was watch them interact with each other in the moments after the greatest basketball days of their lives.
They got to share it together at the Langley Events Centre, and as its seniors walked off the court for the final time in their high school careers, it was impossible to predict just how many more post-secondary class reunions there were going to be over the course of their lives.
Not a bad way to say goodbye to another season of B.C. senior girls high school hoops.
If you’re reading this story or viewing these photos on any website other than one belonging to a university athletic department, it has been taken without appropriate permission. In these challenging times, true journalism will survive only through your dedicated support and loyalty. VarsityLetters.ca and all of its exclusive content has been created to serve B.C.’s high school and university sports community with hard work, integrity and respect. Feel free to drop us a line any time at howardtsumura@gmail.com.
Great write up, nailed it!
A great write-up, Howard, as we’ve grown to expect. I was eagerly awaiting it. As a longtime Argyllian who was unable to attend the game you went under the ‘stats’ and really fleshed out the whole picture. Well done and and well done Argyle Senior Girls, BC Champions!!
Another stellar article by the master himself, makes you feel like you were right there (and I was) that’s how good Howard is. Congrats Anthony and Argyle, deserving champs.