From College Heights to Cranbrook Hill, the UNBC connection has snagged not just one but three of the city’s top graduating high school girls basketball players for next season.
Longtime teammates and forever friends Lauren Cacares, Kayleigh Kennedy and Summer Toor are well on their way to transforming from Cougars to Timberwolves as they prepare to make the jump to U SPORTS basketball next season in the Canada West Conference.
Caceres and Kennedy started playing together nine years ago as Grade 3 students in minor and club basketball in Prince George. Toor came into the picture three years later after she quit competitive hockey. They’ve been inseparable ever since and now they’re about to become varsity student athletes at UNBC.
Never before in the UNBC’s 13-season Canada West history has either TWolves basketball team recruited three players from the same school.
“It’s pretty exciting for us because we’re all close friends too,” said Caceres, who will study biomedical science. “We’ve been playing together for so many years and ow to play for another five years together is really exciting.”
The three College Heights girls will bring the local content on the UNBC women’s basketball team up to five players, with former Duchess Park Condor Sophia Fuller heading into her third year and ex-Condor forward/guard Brynn Dergousoff focused on her sophomore season.
As a young girl, Kennedy attended TWolves games at the Northern Sport Centre and she learned from UNBC players and head coach Sergey Shechepotkin at the Junior Timberwolves Academy, which inspired her to stick with the game.
“I’m excited to push myself to go to a higher level and it’s also really special to me because when we played Timberwolves when we were younger I would always look up to the older girls who played in the team,” said Kennedy.
“Sergey would watch us and he’s been coaching us since Grade 3.”
Kennedy, an aspiring pediatrician, has already taken two courses at UNBC, knowing her course load will be heavy in her first year.
Toor transferred from Duchess Park to College Heights in Grade 9 and all three made the Cougars senior team that year, where they were pushed out of their comfort zone facing playing for a powerful team led by Fuller and Rachel Louckes that ended up fifth in the province among triple-A teams.
“It was good, I didn’t get the junior experience but obviously senior is better,” said Toor, whose mother, Arminder Chatta, played basketball at PGSS and the College of New Caledonia.
Toor is entering the business program with plans to eventually study law.
While their high school team was shut down during the winter of 2020-21, they trained together at Northern Bounce Academy at the PG Dome.
“I think that was kind of like the first time I was playing ‘good’ basketball just because COVID happened around Grade 7 and we never got the tournament experience until provincials that year,” said Caceres. “That was our first travel tournament. We didn’t get a chance to play at all in Grade 8 (because of the pandemic).”
They certainly made up for it. After their first trip to the triple-A tournament College Heights qualified for the provincials the next three years as well.
Caceres, who will major biomedical science, said girls basketball in the city has grown substantially in popularity and in calibre since their Grade 9 year, spurred by some close battles between College Heights and Duchess Park and the opportunity to play year-round basketball at Northern Bounce.
Although the start of the 2025-26 season is still six months away they’ve started practicing with their UNBC teammates. All three College Heights recruits know there’s a steep learning curve ahead of them.
“We have to work on our quickness, the game is more physical and more quick than what we’re used to playing at the high school level,” said Caceres. “We’re not very big, so we’ll have to work on that, and we have to mesh with the team. It’s a young team.”
Jordan Yu starting teaching the game to the girls nearly eight years ago not long after he started Northern Bounce Academy in 2017 and he was their coach again last spring on the Prince George U-17 girls team that finished third at club national championship. He’s ecstatic that they are getting an opportunity to jump to U SPORTS basketball without having to leave the city.
“We started working with these girls when they were in elementary school and to look back at the photos and see the growth, you watch them grow from little kids to graduating student-athletes and it’s pretty awesome to see them get to this level,” said Yu.
“It’s amazing to see three girls from the same school now going to our home university school. Selfishly, I’m very happy I’ll get to go watch these girls at home and cheer on the UNBC Timberwolves. I’ve always said, for our teams to really compete at the U SPORTS level we need to keep our homegrown talent."
All three are guards but play different positions. Yu predicts they will adjust well to the Canada West Conference and will combine to create a dynamic UNBC attack.
“Lorenn is your true point guard, a superb athlete, great ball-handler, also a great mid-range pull-up jumper and vision, she sets up everyone on her team,” said Yu. “She was the driving force behind the College Heights team this year. She’s capable of 32 or 34 points a game.
“At the 2 guard position is Summer, and that’s what she thrives on, shooting the basketball,” he said. “When she gets going it’s pretty deadly. She looks for her outside shot a lot. She will space the floor for that UNBC girls team and probably create ore driving lanes because girls will have to guard her outside the three-point line.
“Kayleigh is your typical 3, she’s longer than the other two (she stands five-foot-eight), she gets up the floor really well and is a great transition player. She’s more of a slashing player but she also has a great three-point shot. She’s really gained some confidence on the floor.”
