Basketball coach Julius holds court around the world
Basketball is taking Kyle Julius from the Far East to Canada’s West Coast.
The seasoned skipper, who has called Kitchener home since 1999, re-upped as coach and general manager of the Fraser Valley Bandits of the Canadian Elite Basketball League on Wednesday.
Julius joined the Abbotsford, B.C., club late last year and guided the group to a second-place finish in the regular season and a berth in the CEBL’s summer series championship game at Meridian Centre in St. Catharines, where the Bandits lost to the Edmonton Stingers.
“I am extremely proud of the foundation we laid last season and I can’t wait to continue to build our grit-and-grind culture,” Julius said in a news release.
Julius is also the coach of the Formosa Dreamers, a professional team based in Taiwan, where he is currently in his second season.
“It means the world to me to be able to coach in Canada during the off-season and I can’t wait to get back to work with the core group from last season (in Abbotsford).”
Before coaching in Taiwan, he ran the bench for three seasons in Vietnam with the Saigon Heat.
The Fraser Valley Bandits broke into the seven-team CEBL with a record of four wins and 16 losses but went 4-2 under Julius in an abbreviated campaign this past season, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Kyle brings a family first approach to coaching and player development,” said Bandits vice-president Dylan Kular, in a news release. “In his first season with our club it became clear that he was intent on building a foundation of success and instilling a culture of dedication and professionalism throughout our roster.”
Julius grew up in Thunder Bay but came south when his father, Stu, was hired to coach the women’s basketball team at Wilfrid Laurier University in 1999.
Kyle Julius, a smooth-shooting guard, was deadly from three- point range in high school and went on to play a pair of seasons for Furman University, an NCAA Division 1 school in South Carolina.
He finished his post-secondary playing career at the University of Guelph and went pro in Italy before becoming a coach with the Mississauga Power and London Lightning in the National Basketball League of Canada, where he won a league title.
The CEBL launched last year. It has four teams in Ontario and one each in Abbotsford, Edmonton and Saskatoon. The league has a mandate to foster homegrown talent and 80 per cent of its players are Canadian.