jauquin bennett-boire

basketball school: Yale (Abbotsford)

freshman’s future: undecided

Wayne Bennett was a big fan of actor Joaquin Phoenix, so when it came time to picking a name for his newborn son, he decided to pay a little homage.

“Actually, I was trying to make it easier,” he says, laughing, of the seven-letter name that was officially typed on the birth certificate. And so, Joaquin became Jauquin. “It’s rare when anyone either pronounces it right or spells it right,” says Jauquin BennettBoire. “But honestly, I’ve just come to accept it. When I see and hear what people make of it, I just start to laugh.”

For the record, it’s pronounced Jah-quinn. Still, over the course of his amazing senior season on the basketball court with Abbotsford’s Yale Lions, it didn’t matter how you said it, or how you spelled it, because everyone knew who you were talking about. JBB. Quin. Special J. They all worked. In what can be considered a campaign for the ages, Bennett-Boire led the Lions to the B.C. Quad A title in March, his game-high 44 points in the championship game just one shy of the all-time title-tilt record set by Gareth Davies of Steveston in 1984.

That was the capper to a most incredible high school career, one that began when Bennett-Boire, amazingly, made his Grade 8 team in Saskatoon as a third-grader. Yes, you read that right. “I didn’t get to play much in the games that year, but I do remember scoring a basket in practice because no one thought I could do it,” says Bennett-Boire.

Along the way he chiselled his frame to the point that when the family moved out west, for the 2011-12 season at Yale, Bennett-Boire already looked like a man as a Grade 9 on the Lions’ senior varsity team.

“When he was 12 I told him he was still too young to lift weights,” says his dad, a former CIS star at Brandon. “By 13, he would be at home doing a hundred pushups at a time.”

While Bennett-Boire is still weighing his options — between attending a U.S. prep school this coming season or accepting an NCAA Div. 1 offer — there is no question he will be on the court next season in a new city.

And so, for a new group of fans, his name will once again bring pronounced difficulties. His game, however, will speak for itself.