Dinos basketball teams battle for national titles
Eight is great.
But the University of Calgary Dinos want more.
Like four?
Yup, Calgary’s two basketball teams are looking to make the cut from eight teams to four for more U Sports Final 8 action at the men’s and women’s national championships, starting Thursday in Halifax and Regina, respectively.
The men have landed in Halifax for their third consecutive Final 8 appearance.
Following their 84-77 Canada West gold-medal victory over the University of Alberta Golden Bears, the Dinos return to Halifax as the No. 2 seed in the eight-team field. Three victories would earn them national supremacy for the first time in school history, but the Dinos aren’t looking past their quarter-final matchup against the No. 7 Brock Badgers on Thursday (11 a.m., usports.live).
There’s no natural rivalry between Calgary and Brock, but it’s still a match full of intrigue. The Badgers were ranked in the top three nationally for most of the year, but draw the seventh seed after falling to the Ryerson Rams in the Ontario conference semifinal, earning the lone wild-card bid to the tournament. It’s a berth many in southern Ontario thought should have gone to the Badgers a year ago, when it was the Dinos that received the at-large bid.
The Badgers got a measure of revenge in October, taking a 12-point win over the Dinos on their home floor in St. Catharines, Ont., in preseason action.
“We’re not the same team that we were when we played them (in October),” said Dinos point guard David Kapinga, named the Canada West first star this week after a game-high 32 points in the conference championship final. “We’ve been talking about ‘different team, different result.’ The season was long, and there were a couple of losses, but it’s all worth it at the end of the day to have this opportunity again.”
The drop to Brock was the Dinos’ only loss of a difficult non-conference schedule.
The women, meanwhile, face the same situation as last week.
On the road against the host Trinity Western Spartans, Calgary needed a win in the conference bronze-medal game just to get to the national tournament. With that 65-63 win in tow, the Dinos turn their attention to the next hurdle, the top-seeded Carleton Ravens in the national quarter-final Thursday (noon, usports.live).
It’s the Dinos’ first trip to the national tournament since 2013. That was Damian Jennings’ first season at the helm of the program. The Final 8 was in Regina that year and the Dinos even played — and beat — Carleton in the first round.
Brianna Ghali, the Canada West Sylvia Sweeney Award winner for excellence in academics, basketball and community service, will wrap up her varsity career on the biggest stage of all this weekend.
“We don’t want to ‘play up’ to teams if they appear to be better than us on paper,” said Ghali. “We know coming into games like this that we need to bring our best or it is not going to be good. It comes down to us knowing what we need to bring and how to bring it.” Diawara honoured: Mamba Diawara of the Dinos was named a U Sports second-team all-Canadian at an awards banquet Wednesday night.
The fourth-year guard out of Montreal led Calgary in scoring with 22 points per game, which also ranked seventh nationally.