The Sutherland senior ultimate team played with spirit, athleticism and unity on their way to winning the high school provincial championship title over the weekend at the University of British Columbia.
It was a powerful combination of those three traits - spirit, athleticism and unity - that led to victory, each one playing an important part for the team that dubbed itself the Protectors of the Human Race.
In terms of unity, the Protectors may have longer, more powerful connections than any high school team in any sport on the North Shore. Five of them have been playing ultimate - a disc sport that combines elements of other team games such as soccer, basketball and football - since they formed a team called The Vertically Challenged way back in Grade 2.
"Not many kids at 17 and 18 have been playing together for eight years," said Sutherland head coach Carla Keffer. Carla's son Cole Keffer and teammates Megan Loewen, Kieran Newbery, Ryan Hoy and Chris Harvey were so talented as pre-teens that they'd play little mini games at halftime of the ultra-competitive adult league games that were held at UBC back in the day. The connections go even deeper for the team as six of the players also suited up for the Sutherland soccer team that won the senior boys provincial championship last fall.
Unity, however, can only take you so far. At a certain point you need to add talent and athleticism, and the Protectors have that in huge amounts. Cole was the team's star and leader, a role the Grade 12 multi-sport athlete also played on the school's soccer, basketball and rugby teams. This summer he'll suit up for Team Canada at the World Junior Ultimate Championships in Lecco, Italy.
Cole jumped into the Sutherland ultimate program when he arrived at the school and his presence - along with his oldschool teammates who have been there since Day 1 - has helped turn the sport into a mainstay on the school's sporting scene. Popularity soared two years ago when Sutherland's junior team won the provincial title.
"Everybody jumped on the bandwagon for the next year," said Carla, adding that this season approximately 100 kids out of a student body of less than 900 played on one of the school's two junior teams, Grade 8 team or senior team. "The respected athletes are playing and it's becoming a respected sport. It's a very, very difficult sport and it combines the skills of all of the other sports."
There's one other draw that is great for getting high school kids out: it's co-ed.
"The kids love to hang out," said Carla with a laugh. "And what other sport do you get to play with the boys or with the girls?" This season the Protectors went undefeated, including a win at Spring Reign, a massive tournament held in Burlington, Wash. that included many of the best teams from across Western Canada, the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
At the provincial championships Sutherland steamrolled through the field until meeting a combined team from all-boys private school St. George's and all-girls school York House in the final.
"It was crazy," said Carla. "It was the hardest game we've had in our whole season."
The Protectors took an early 6-3 lead and were still ahead 8-7 at halftime. The Combos, however, jumped ahead in the second half and were up 14-13 when the scoring was capped at 15. Needing to score twice in a row to claim the win, Sutherland first got a jawdropping catch from Cole on a long bomb to the back of the end zone from Newbery.
"He's a force to be reckoned with," said Carla of Cole. "It looked like it was almost uncatchable."
The Protectors then made a crucial defensive stop with the game on the line before finishing off the win with Loewen diving to snag a short pass from Ty Barbieri.
The team's boys - Grade 12 leaders Keffer, Newbery and Hoy, along with Grade 11 standouts Barbieri and Aidan Wiebe - formed the backbone of the squad, said Carla, but the coach added it was the girls who likely sealed the deal. The York House girls were particularly strong, and so the Combos went with a strategy of placing more girls than boys on the field when they had control of the play, forcing Sutherland to match those numbers. Adding more pressure to the mix was the fact that Sutherland was missing Rachel Jones, a star athlete who was absent on championship Sunday because she was playing soccer for the Whitecaps elite girls team. The rest of the Sutherland girls, however, shone in the victory.
"It was a real challenge for our girls to keep up with these amazing girls from York House, so kudos go out to our girls for just being able to compete," said Carla. "I've always told my teams that the best co-ed teams, the teams that win championships, are the teams that have the best girls.. .. It has to be a seven-person game out there. It can't be what I call a 'boy show' with the boys throwing it over the girls' heads and stuff like that. Our girls persevered. They were awesome."
The final piece of the puzzle was the team's spirit, a piece more important in ultimate than in most any other sport. The game is played without referees and so teams are left to police themselves, employing some built-in traditions that are meant to encourage fair play. Each team awards their opponents spirit points at the end of each match and the team that collects the most points wins the tournament's Spirit of the Game trophy. This year, that award went to Sutherland.
"The guys that were giving out the trophies said that it doesn't happen very often that the team that wins the tournament, wins the spirit," said Carla. "It's unusual for the team that's kicking everybody's butt, basically, to also get awarded that trophy. For us, winning the Spirit Trophy was as meaningful if not more meaningful than winning the championship."
The Spirit Trophy, in fact, is part of what makes ultimate special, said Carla, herself a longtime player. Each game involves a little post-match mingling featuring games or cheers shared with your opponents. Sutherland's go-to spirit move was to play a rock-paper-scissors tournament with their opponents after each game.
"In a tough game there's a winner and a loser but then you play the spirit game and everybody is laughing by the end of it, everybody is having a good time," said Carla. "If there were any conflicts on the field or any hard feelings, all that goes away. It's just a great way to end the game."
