There seems to be a girls basketball revolution brewing in the halls of Seycove secondary.
The smallest public high school on the North Shore managed to win three of the four North Shore girls titles it was vying for this year, claiming top spot in the Grade 8, junior and senior AA divisions.
The Grade 8s and seniors have already booked their spots in their respective provincial championships with the juniors hoping to do the same this weekend. It’s quite a change for a school that was never considered a basketball power — the senior girls won their first-ever North Shore AA title just three years ago.
“Seycove was never really known as an athletics school or a basketball school,” said Darcy Grant, head coach of this year’s Seycove senior girls team. That has changed in a hurry. Grant traces the basketball uprising to the Seymour Basketball League, a branch of Steve Nash Youth Basketball that is run by a number of dedicated community volunteers. The Seymour league started producing some pretty talented players who in most cases ended up moving on to Seycove.
Grant says that he and fellow Seycove teacher Geoff Russell, currently the coach of the Seyhawks junior girls team, saw this wave coming and decided that the school should jump on and ride it out.
“The genesis of where this started is that we were able to see about three years ago that we were going to have some very strong athletes and basketball players coming up through Seycove,” said Grant. “For Geoff and I it was important that we acknowledged that and take some action.”
In 2012 Grant and Russell started uniting all of the school’s girls basketball programs under one banner, hopefully setting the stage for a culture change.
“It began with our program philosophy, working with the younger grades and slowly moving up with them,” said Grant. “And then from there it was really just holding the girls accountable and asking them to make a greater commitment, asking them to make greater sacrifices and invest more time in skill development and buying into the new philosophy and culture that we were trying to sell to them.”
It seems to have worked splendidly. The teams are racking up wins, the players are on board and now, said Grant, the whole school is getting into it.
“It’s taken a bit of time, (but) I think the culture has changed,” he said. “Winning is a great thing and winning gets everyone excited. We’ve noticed just this year with our three teams winning North Shore titles, our teachers are cheering the kids on, they’re showing their support more, they’re bringing their classes to games.”
The coaches are doing their best to make sure that the excitement spreads beyond the school and into the unique Deep Cove/Seymour neighbourhood. High school players now go back to the youth programs to coach the next group of kids.
“It’s pretty cool, actually,” said Russell. “A lot of the girls that Darcy and I coach, their younger siblings have been following along for years and they’ve all started playing at an early age. . . . The girls have made that connection with the elementary kids, which helps build the community around here. Girls want to play basketball. It’s really a testament to our group of high school girls, how much they enjoy the game and how much time they’re willing to put in to work with the younger kids to get them to enjoy the game. They’ve really created a nice culture here.”
Leading the way now are the Seycove senior girls, who finished second in the North Shore premier league behind only Handsworth and then knocked off the Windsor Dukes 71-51 in the North Shore AA final. The Seyhawks beat the Dukes again Thursday night in the Lower Mainland championships to clinch a berth in the provincial championships.
The senior team boasts a number of talented players, including Grade 11 forward Claudia Hart, who averages nearly 22 points per game; Grade 12 guards Rebecca Varty and Alex Glass; and Grade 10 upstarts Lindsey Bott and Sage Stobbart. Bott hit two huge threes to spur Seycove’s come-from-behind, 48-41 win over Windsor Thursday. Stobbart, meanwhile, recently attended an identification camp for the cadet junior national team.
“We’re very fortunate to have a group of girls that are very committed and very talented,” said Grant. “They’ve really bought in. We try to run this program almost like a small university program. We make sure the girls are filling out academic reports, progress reports every month, we ask them to fundraise, we ask them to volunteer, we ask them to go above and beyond and to give back to Seycove and the basketball program. And I think in turn we’ve been able to have a lot of success in a short amount of time.”
The girls deserve all the credit for the success they are having now, said Grant.
“They haven’t just kind of shown up. They’ve worked for everything that they’ve earned.”
No Seycove basketball team has won a provincial title, but they’re close, said Russell.
“That’s the goal, it’s been the program goal since Day 1,” he said. “We always tell the girls that we strive for excellence. . . . We’re hoping we’re able to get a provincial title somewhere down the road here. Hopefully sooner rather than later.”
