Like all Blues legends, these two have pretty cool nicknames. They call them Ace and Carm.
The Capilano Blues will be playing for a national championship this weekend, led by a pair of players who will go down as two of the greatest in the history of the program.
Point guard Ashley dela Cruz Yip, a.k.a. Ace, and power forward Carmelle M’Bikata, Carm to her teammates, arrived on the North Vancouver campus together in 2013, joining a rebuilding team that was searching for some leaders. In the five years since then the pair have teamed up to launch an assault on the school’s record books, with Ace leaving as the all-time assist leader in league history and Carm setting the marks for the most career points and rebounds in team history.
“They’ve set a very high standard,” said head coach Ramin Sadaghiani. “I think both records are going to be pretty tough to beat. I think they kind of leave the program as legends.”
The two players are going out on top, having finally broken through with a PacWest championship win in their fifth seasons with the program. There has been some heartbreak along the way though.
It all started back in the summer of 2013 when the pair first showed up to play with the Blues. Ace was a point guard with lots of swagger and a big personality coming out of Vancouver’s Britannia Secondary.
“I always saw the confidence in her,” said Sadaghiani. “You could see the passion of wanting to be one of the best players in the league right out of the gate. You could also see her leadership style.”
Carm was much quieter, but her play on the court spoke volumes, even when she was a high school student out of Abbotsford’s WJ Mouat Secondary attending tryouts against college veterans.
“You could see how athletic she was, how competitive she was,” said Sadaghiani. “She wasn’t afraid of contact. She’d get after our fourth- and fifth-year players and she was in Grade 12.”
Both players stepped into fairly big roles almost immediately during that first season.
“Ashley and Carmelle were two of those who really had to step up and play right out of the gate,” said Sadaghiani. “It was a rebuilding year where we had a lot of rookies. So our rookies had to be thrown in the fire and step up, they didn’t really have an opportunity to be rookies because they had minutes they had to play.”
Since then they’ve grown to become one of the deadliest duos in league history. Ace has racked up 384 career assists in her five years, many of those passes finding their way into the hands of her great friend.
“I know where Carm is at all times,” she said. “We’ve been playing with each other for so long that we really know each other’s style of playing. It really makes me happy that a good chunk of those assists were to her. I can really count on her to finish around the rim. Sometimes you pass the ball and you’re like, ‘Oh, is it going to go in?’ But when you pass the ball to Carm, I’m just basically padding my own stats. I get an assist every time I get her the ball, so I just might as well get her the ball every time.”
Carm has taken advantage of those passes. Her 1,149 career points are third all-time in league history, and her 647 rebounds rank seventh all-time in PacWest play. She credits Ace for putting her in a position to succeed.
“She does the majority of the hard work and then other players just move off of her penetration and she dishes a good pass,” M’Bikata said. “I’m just so proud of what she’s developed into. From the start we’ve just grown. We’ve got such a great bond. … Off the court we can talk about anything. And on the court we play well together, she knows where I’ll be for the dish.”
Things got rocky for the team with back-to-back silver medals coming in the third and fourth years for Ace and Carm. Both years the team put up strong showings in the regular season only to fall just short of their final goal.
“Getting a silver is not necessarily something you want to feel,” said Ace.” I think getting a silver is even worse than getting a bronze – at least bronze you are winning a game to get it. When you’re silver you know you’re super close. It was pretty hard those two years, but we learned from it.”
Those losses, added Carm, are part of the reason why the two players have stuck around for a fifth and final season when many other players have moved on.
“I didn’t want to finish that fourth year ending off like that,” she said. “We had a lot of success that year, but not finishing off with a gold was very tough.”
That loyalty to the program finally paid off this season when Capilano topped Camosun 75-70 in the PacWest final March 3 at Vancouver Island University.
“Some players have left – maybe after a few silvers they didn’t believe that we could do it, or the road looked too difficult,” said Sadaghiani. “But (Ashley and Carmelle) always stuck by us, by me, by our athletic program and by our women’s basketball team. Winning that championship really is a testament to their hard work over the last five years and their loyalty to our team and to our program.”
“I’m very, very proud of our team,” added Ace. “For me it was staying on a team and building a winning team, instead of going to a team that I thought would be a winning team. It was really about putting in the time, and that’s something that Carmelle and I have talked about over the years. Putting in our time, staying committed to the team, staying committed to Ramin and trusting the process.”
There’s one more test for the Blues, a team loaded with talented players who have led the charge alongside Ace and Carm. On Thursday they’ll face Montreal’s Dawson College Blues, the returning national silver medalists and No. 2 ranked team in the country, to open the CCAA national championships at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. It’s taken the team five years to get to this point, but now that they’ve made it they don’t want to just be tourists – they want to do some damage.
“I want to have fun, but I want to win,” said Ace. “I’m not a very good loser. I enjoy winning very much.” No matter what happens, though, these two players will be leaving Capilano as two of the best to ever call themselves Blues, said Sadaghiani.
“They’re leaving our program not just as great basketball players but also great students off the court and great leaders,” he said. “Both are going to do amazing things down the road for sure.”
