THE FRONT ROW with BRUCE BOURQUIN, Jan. 2, 2015
I love this time of year, short of your good ol' 24-degree frigid weather.
Because during basketball season, unlike some other sports, at times you will see some pretty unique things. The Post Falls boys hoops team making a trek this weekend to play in the Centennial New Year's Invitational at CenturyLink Arena in Boise. High schools from Montana and other states wrestling in the Tri-State tournament at North Idaho College.
Oh yeah, that and the Canadian high school basketball team of Georges P. Vanier Secondary School from Courtenay, British Columbia paying its first visit to North Idaho College, to play in the North Idaho Inn-vitational Holiday Classic.
NOW LOOK past the fact the Towhees - which is a bird that inhabitats places like Courtenay - lost its first two games of the tournament.
Instead, put yourself in their shoes, Canadian or otherwise. Going into the tourney, the Towhees were 13-3 and looking for some tough competition. They found it, losing big to Post Falls, 82-32, on Monday and 59-41 on Tuesday to Mountain View of Meridian.
The school has been around since 1968, when it first started playing basketball.
Head coach and athletic director Larry Street has been the boys basketball coach since 1976, after he graduated from and played for Simon Fraser University, located in Burnaby, British Columbia, 124 miles from Courtenay and 10 miles from Vancouver. He retired after last season as an A.D. and is now coaching. On Feb. 20, he was inducted into the Basketball BC Hall of Fame as a builder and has taken five different high schools to the AAA provincial championships.
"That's why we came down here," Street said of the tournament at NIC. "It takes us to another level, we see what we need to do.
Hopefully we can go home and that'll pay off the rest of our season.
"Americans, it's ingrained in all their sports since they're little and our guys are learning that now. Our kids start learning the game right when they get to high school. We like to travel everywhere, sometimes in the (United) States. But this is the first time we've been to Coeur d'Alene. It's beautiful here, we'd come back in a heartbeat."
Last season, Vanier finished second in its league and fourth in the island zone, which is similar to Regionals here. The state tournament here would be the provincial tournament up north.
"The teams up north are having trouble with us because we're so big," Street said. "Two teams we lost to, it was trap, trap, trap. We're seeing that too and that's what we're here for, to learn how to break that kind of pressure. We don't see that kind of pressure (in Canada) at all."
Street talked about the style of Canadian hoops.
"It's kind of like Europe," Vanier said. "Except we need to get more aggressive in our all-around game, not just bits and pieces. We're looking for consistency."
ONE OF the best players on the Vanier team is 6-foot-3 guard Anders Storgaard, a 17-year-old exchange student from Denmark who appears during games as if he could possibly snag at least a backup spot on a 5A or 4A Inland Empire League team. On Tuesday, in the loss to Mountain View, he scored eight points but scored 16 points on Dec. 22 at the Hyack Tournament in New Westminster, B.C.
He plans on playing in a Danish league, then a professional league in Denmark, before trying to fulfill his dreams of playing college ball in America.
"I plan on going to the states to play college ball," Storgaard said. "I went to a camp in Lithuania where this lady showed me different schools in the United States and in Canada. I looked at possibly going to some private schools in Washington before I decided to go to Vanier."
So it'll be interesting to see how well Vanier plays once it goes back home to British Columbia, taking the lessons the Towhees have learned from playing against tougher American competition in Coeur d'Alene.
Bruce Bourquin is a sports writer at The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2013 or via e-mail at [email protected]