There are competitive home games on the horizon for the McMath Wildcats. It’s just going to take a little while longer to get there.
The Wildcats are continuing their “homestand” this week as heavy favourites to win another Richmond Senior Girls Basketball Championship. The only real suspense of the eight team tournament is which school will be joining McMath in Thursday’s final?
The Tia Tsang led McRoberts Strikers are the best bet after going 8-1 in the regular season but it’s still going to be a daunting task to keep up with the province’s No. 2 ranked AAA team.
McMath entered the post-season after easily winning their own tournament and likely won’t be challenged again until the semi-finals of next week’s Crehan Cup Lower Mainland Championships which also take place at the Steveston school.
It was actually part of the plan when coaches Anne Gillrie-Carre and Paul Jones put their schedule together.
The Wildcats played in three very competitive tournaments over consecutive weeks in January and the idea was to make the Wildcat Classic an opportunity to catch their breath. GP Vanier was expected to give them a better challenge in the final but the Courtenay school was not at full strength and was promptly taken care of — 77-25.
“We were hoping to have some easier games and one competitive game,” said Gillrie-Carre. “It did give us a chance to practice some things against different people and we were able to give all the kids different playing time.
“Our challenge all season has been playing (these type of games) all week then go banging into these hard weekend tournaments.”
When the Wildcats advance to next month’s provincial tournament, they will have not seen two of the province’s top five ranked teams all season — Riverside and Kelowna — while only facing No. 1 Brookswood once back in early December. It wasn’t like they were trying to avoid those teams, it’s just the way tournaments unfolded, especially with many having a large mix of AA schools.
“We haven’t seen them but they haven’t seen us either,” said Jones. “It’s just the way it worked out. To be honest, I don’t really pay much attention to our opponents anyways, just what we are doing instead. We used this tournament to focus on taking care of the basketball, rebounding and stretching our defence.”
SFU bound Jessica Jones was named the Classic MVP. Her starting teammates — Jessica Zawada, Bobbi-Jo Colburn, Lyric Custodio and Justin McCaskill were all named all-stars.
The city final tips off at 7 p.m. Thursday. The Lower Mainland AAA Championships start the following week with McMath advancing directly to the quarter-finals. Churchill, Handsworth and New West, all honourable mentions in the latest provincial rankings, are expected to the Wildcats’ biggest challengers.
