College Heights pulls off triple-A zone threepeat

It’s the dream of every high school basketball to end the season playing for a BC banner at the provincial championship.

If you’re lucky, that might happen once or twice before graduation day.

For College Heights Cougars forward Tolu Bankole that provincial dream keeps repeating itself with every turn of the calendar from February to March. Each time he wakes and discovers it’s come true.

Saturday morning at Duchess Park gym it was Groundhog Day all over for Bankole and the Cougars, who rolled to 63-52 win over the host Condors in the North Central zone triple-A boys basketball championship.

That’s three in a row, a run that started for Bankole two seasons ago when he was the lone Grade 9 player on a College Heights senior team that won the North Central zone title. In less than two weeks the 17-year-old will join his Cougar teammates of the court at the 16-team triple-A provincial tournament at Langley Events Centre trying to bring home some hardware.

“Provincials is just such a great atmosphere there, the tournament is the best out of all sports in high school – I play volleyball too and basketball provincials is always the best and it’s always fun,” said Bankole. “They’ve got a nice banquet, all the teams are great competition, it’s just a great experience.”

The Cougars swarmed the Condors from the opening tip-off and built a 23-12 lead by the end of the first quarter and never lost sight of the big prize awaiting them. They maintained the gap to 38-27 at the half and 53-40 by three-quarter time and were never threatened, despite brief surge for Duchess in the late stages when they got as close as nine points down.

Bankole said losing to the D.P. Todd Trojans in the City League final two weeks ago gave him and his teammates added motivation to be relentless in the zone tournament and they were that, winning all three of their games decisively.

“We missed out on city championships earlier so this fueled our fire to come and handle business,” said Bankole. “That one stung for a while so we had back and take care of business here and we’re glad we were able to handle that.”

The six-foot-four Bankole showed his leaping ability to get to rebounds, he was tough to beat one-on-one and his scoring touch, inside and out, earned him zone tournament MVP honours.

“This game we just had to trust each other and trust our bench,” he said. “We were in foul trouble early on, so we had to go deeper into the ratio than we usually do. I think this was the tightest game we had with them all season.”

College Heights forward Caleb Fuller was picked as the top defensive player of the tournament but he was equally good at producing offence and his 17 points led all scorers in the final. He was picked as player of the game in the final and that’s nothing new for him.

Last year as a Grade 10 player Fuller won zone tournament MVP honours. He does things on the court that might not show up on the stats sheet and his aggressive approach can get him in foul trouble but if he can stay in the game he profoundly shapes the Cougars’ fortunes.

“Caleb does that every game,” said Bankole. “He’s always a dog, he loves to get after rebounds and we’ve got lots of guys on this team that can just do all the dirty work,” said Bankole”

Coached by former UNBC Timberwolf Darren Hunter, the Condors put up more resistance than they did earlier in the tournament when College Heights beat them by 14 points Friday morning.

“It was definitely a really hard game and I thought we came out and played as a team and played really hard, we just really wanted this,” said the 16-year-old Fuller. “We did this last year and we just played really good.

‘I’m looking forward to playing the top competition in the province and really showing what we can do down there. We’re really close, we’ve been playing with each other for a long time now and we’re really good friends and we have a lot of good chemistry on and off the court and our coach Jordan (Yu) is amazing.”

Fuller, 16, was brought up in a basketball family as the youngest sibling with three sisters, one of whom is named Sophia, who pays university basketball for the UNBC Timberwolves, whose assistant coach is Caleb and Sophia’s father Dave.

“My whole family played a lot of basketball and I really learned how to play from them,” said Caleb Fuller. “I don’t play the same position but just watching them I really developed my game.”

Bankole contributed 13 points and Dillon Piddocke had himself a 12-point game.

For the Condors, Julian Victorino had an 11-point game, Oliver Provencher put up nine points and Finn Thielmann finished with eight.

Cougars head coach Jordan Yu said the Condors showed steady improvement throughout the season and there was no point in Saturday’s final where his team felt it could take their feet off the gas pedal.

“Every game they’re getting better and better, so all the credit to the coaching staff over there at Duchess  Park, that squad battled for 40 minutes and you can’t take one possession off of them,” said Yu.

“It was a good final and that’s what we expected. We wanted to have some good competitive games before we head to the provincial championship and we got that.”

Thielmann, a Grade 12 senior, in his last game in a Condors uniform was hoping his team would find a way to force a second final Saturday afternoon against College Heights in the double-knockout tournament.

“They had a great start and we came out kind of slow, we battled back hard but just couldn’t close the gap after that,” said Thielmann.

“I came in really hoping we’d win it, it was tough losing, I really wanted to go to provs with this team, it would have been a lot of fun but whatever, I hope these guys have a great year next year and they’ll something cool, I’m sure they will.

“I love playing basketball and I’m sad it’s my last year and I’m done. I’ll probably got to UNBC now, but not for basketball, I wish I was good enough.”

The Cougars were not provincially ranked this season and will likely be ranked 14th or 15th to start the 16-team affair in Langley, which means facing one of the top team in the first round.

Triple-A tournament awards

Most valuable player - Tolu Bankole

Top defensive player - Caleb Fuller

First All-Star Team

Ismail Andrew-Cisse, Duchess Park

Dillon Piddocke, College Heights

Finn Thielmann, Duchess Park

Jack Sales, Correlieu

Julian Victorino, Duchess Park