NORTH DELTA — Let the speculation begin.
The road to the Langley Events Centre and the championship final 2013 B.C. senior boys Triple A basketball championships gets its actual road map Sunday afternoon.
Beginning at 1 p.m., the 20-team draw for the March 12-16 tournament will be unveiled live, quadrant by quadrant, during a webcast being produced at the event site. Go to langleyeventscentre.com/aaaboys and click on the ‘play now’ tab.
General consensus has, in no particular order, the top four teams in the draw being the Fraser Valley threesome of Langley’s Walnut Grove Gators, the Yale Lions of Abbotsford, Surrey’s White Rock Christian Academy Warriors, and the Kitsilano Blue Demons of Vancouver.
As usual, however, the entire 20-team field comes into the event at varying degrees of efficiency. Some have struggled late in their campaigns, while others, like Lower Mainland runners-up Burnaby South, W.J. Mouat from Abbotsford and Howe Sound champion Handsworth of North Vancouver, enter on their strongest up-ticks of the season.
Another of those rising teams is Kitsilano. The Blue Demons, ravaged by a hardy flu bug that hit midseason and took its own time leaving, claimed the Lower Mainland title on Friday night with a 68-58 win over a Burnaby South team which dropped out of the provincial rankings early in the season and spent January and February discovering its identity as a top defensive club.
Vancouver’s St. George’s Saints, the Burnaby Mountain Lions, and Vancouver’s Sir Winston Churchill Bulldogs make up the rest of the zone’s five B.C. tournament entrants. Churchill had to beat Richmond’s J.N. Burnet Breakers 69-54 on Friday in a sudden-elimination game to claim the zone last spot to provincials.
The Fraser Valley was set to seed its B.C. entrants on Saturday with four games. It’s eight-team field will include Walnut Grove, WRCA, Yale and Mouat, along with Sardis of Chilliwack, Surrey’s Enver Creek, Pitt Meadows and defending B.C. champion Terry Fox of Port Coquitlam.
Oak Bay and Claremont of Victoria have earned Vancouver Island’s two berths. Handsworth beat league-rival Sentinel in back-to-back sudden-elimination games to win the Howe Sound’s lone berth. Caledonia of Terrace will represent the Northwest, Cranbrook’s Mt. Baker the Kootenays, and North Peace of Ft. St. John the North Central zone.
South Kamloops it set to face NorKam in Saturday’s Okanagan final.
Two teams ranked the entire season not among the final 20: Surrey’s Tamanawis Wildcats and the Kelowna Owls.
Since moving to a 20-team format a number of seasons ago, the tournament has begun on a Tuesday with four play-in games. Those winners advances into each of the draw’s four quadrants for the Sweet 16 round on Wednesday.
This is the final year of Triple A being the largest tier of competition for B.C. senior boys basketball. In 2014, a Quad A tier is being added, and it is expected to be known in the weeks immediately following this season’s championships which schools will be playing at which tiers for a two-season period beginning in 2013-14.
