Teamwork not a hard ‘cell’ at Semiahmoo
BOYS BASKETBALL: Ditching smartphones for human interaction proves fruitful for No. 5 quad-A squad
No high schooler is old enough to remember an ancient time — B.C. (before cellphones) — when the world was not so interconnected and humankind made eye contact.
Coalescence, not liberation was the goal of Semiahmoo Totems senior boys basketball coach Ed Lefurgy when he asked his team to participate in an experiment. The Totems would put their cellphones away for a weekend at a tournament in Kelowna and see where it led.
For many, it led to Monopoly, a board game first patented in 1904 and called “the rage of America” at the time.
“It sounds crazy, but we had to interact with each other,” explained Grade 11 forward Adam Paige. “Some guys just sat there at first. They didn’t know what to do. But most of us played cards and Monopoly — a lot. We got really competitive with that. It worked out really well. We bonded.”
Ranked fifth by B.C. basketball maven Howard Tsumura entering this week’s provincial quad-A high school tournament at Langley Events Centre, the Totems aren’t fingered to win it, but as an all-glueguy team, they might be the No. 1 contender.
Whether they stand and deliver at crunch time — Semiahmoo had a tough first-round matchup Wednesday against the Kitsilano Blue Demons — remains to be seen. What’s not in dispute is the Totems are close-knit and extremely well-travelled.
This season, the ’Totes have toted baggage for games in San Diego, Lynden, Wash., Oregon — where Semiahmoo grilled the quad-A Tillamook Cheesemakers — Victoria, Courtenay and Kelowna, besides taking in a Washington Huskies game in Seattle.
“It was a lot of fun for us,” said Grade 12 point guard Brian Wallack. “And it’s really improved our competitiveness. Just bonding as a team, having fun, playing board games, sleeping in hotels, eating together, playing in high-intensity games against very athletic teams really brought us together.”
Since he arrived in 2009, Lefurgy — recruited by Semiahmoo vice-principal Brian Tait, who won back-toback provincial titles with the Richmond Colts in the 1980s — has been attempting to make hoops success part of the school’s mainstream.
Championship banners? They line the walls of the gymnasium in South Surrey in such profusion they could be used for wallpaper. Volleyball, rugby, cross country, golf, the Totems have led a charmed life when it comes to athletic success. Olympic long-distance swimming bronze-medallist Richard Weinberger, Edmonton Eskimos kicker Sean Whyte and NHL first-round draft pick Colton Gillies are among Semi’s distinguished alumni.
But the Totems’ recent history in the flagship sport of senior boys basketball was grim, until Lefurgy arrived to begin a cultural change.
“I hadn’t heard about Semiahmoo Secondary too much before I got here,” admits Lefurgy, a native of Chilliwack who played college basketball at the University of the Fraser Valley. “I looked around and noticed we only had three boys basketball banners. A second-place trophy in the provincials, berths in 1961, ’62 and ’76, were as good as it got. I wanted a challenge. I didn’t want to take over an existing program that already had success. I wanted to start something on my own.”
From 1977 through 2014, the Totems failed to qualify for the provincials, with the Semiahmoo Peninsula’s most successful senior boys hoops program — White Rock Christian — operating just five minutes away. The Warriors won provincial titles in 1999, 2003 and 2005 and were contenders throughout the decade.
“The vision was to get to the B.C.s, but it just doesn’t happen overnight,” said Lefurgy, who began with grades 8 and 9 before taking over the senior boys’ program.
According to the head coach, the ascent of the Totems began with the arrival of one blue-chip player, Skylar Sheehan, who went against convention and cast his lot with Semiahmoo instead of the more-established and winning basketball tradition at WRCA.
“Players came here because they wanted to play with Skylar,” Lefurgy said. “Our success all depended on Skylar’s success. And our credibility as a basketball program went way up.”
A 6-foot-5 shooting guard, Sheehan went on to play in the university ranks for the Calgary Dinos, just as his father Dave, the current junior boys basketball coach at Semiahmoo, did in the 1980s at Victoria.
A year after Skylar left — 2015 — the Totems qualified for provincials for the first time in 39 years, winning their opening game, but losing to the eventual champion Yale Lions in the second round.
The jarring reaction to Sheehan’s untimely death last April — at age 20 from heart complications — still resonates with the Totems, none of whom knew him as a teammate, but all of whom attended his service and played in a KidSport fundraiser in his honour.
“His dad is still a huge influence here,” Wallack said. “Whenever I see him (Dave Sheehan), I think of Skylar. I saw him as the school hero. I wanted to be like him. It impressed on me to keep moving forward and keeping playing basketball.”
No longer semi-soft, semi-skilled and semi-committed, Semi’s senior boys are fully into it now.