The changing face of youth sports and internal politics has high school programs struggling to adapt to new realities
If you’re a Gen X, or even an older Millennial, the brand name Kodak still has some cachet. The company was the first to bring photographic film to mass market (film, for those younger digital generations, being the light-sensitive material that cameras used to record images on), rising to prominence and commercial dominance around the world.
Then, the world changed.
Film rapidly became an irrelevant medium as photography and its video counterpart began being imprinted onto far more convenient digital memory sticks. Film, along with its cramped darkrooms and toxic chemicals, began to fade. Immense financial struggles drove Kodak into bankruptcy — though the company survives to this day, in a much smaller and niche-market serving form.
This, in a nutshell, is what is happening to high school basketball in B.C.
The world is changing, and secondary school hoops are struggling to change along with it.
“It's in a transformation stage,” said SFU women’s coach Bruce Langford, a three-time provincial champ as a high-school coach before heading up Burnaby mountain.
“The development of basketball used to be in schools, but the clubs have taken more and more and more of a role.
“Now, it's really not in schools, but it is in a few schools. It's hurt the average program ... it's hurt everybody overall, in terms of competitive basketball across the board.”
The biggest issue, from those surveyed on the school, club, and post-secondary side, is a simple one: coaches, and the lack of them.
School coaches are unpaid volunteer positions. Dedicating the time and effort involved, quipped one coach, makes it less of a labour of love, and more of one of insanity. And if you’re a volunteer from the community, you face extra hurdles. A lack of access to school gyms whose districts don’t want to pay for the extra custodial staffing or the spectre of liability issues.
(High school basketball) is certainly in a transition period right now,” said UBC coach Kevin Hanson. “The frustrations ... I’m talking with coaches all the time. Some of them are parents, some of them are teachers, and they're disgruntled because some of the opportunities are being restricted.
“It's very, very difficult nowadays to run a program. Back in the day when I was going through high school ... there were real programs, there were crowds and student involvement. It’s a lot tougher now for some of these schools to get gym time for coaches to do what they want.
“So you're seeing fewer and fewer programs, you're seeing the same teams play in so many tournaments. So by the time you get to provincial championships, you've played against the same team five, six, seven times. And not that it's anticlimactic, but, it makes a lot more difficult for the best players to keep improving.”
Paul Eberhardt coaches the West Vancouver Highlanders, who are headed back to the provincials for a second straight year. The only coach to take four different schools to the B.C. championships — he did it with Magee, McNair and R.C. Palmer, as well as winning a junior college national title with Langara — few can match the breadth and experience of the West Vancouver school district’s vice-principal of academies has had in B.C. hoops.
He doubled down on the coaching shortage as the biggest contributing factor.
“I think high school basketball in particular, is really thriving in many ways, but it's also in trouble in many ways,” he said, pointing out nearly 300 schools have boys and girls programs.
“The biggest issue that we're having in high school for sure, is coaches. It's so hard to get dedicated, committed teacher-coaches in particular. The high school system really needs those people.
"We have a lot of great community coaches now — we have more community coaches we've ever had — but ... newer teachers coming into the profession don't view it as maybe different generations of teachers did. There's no there's no appetite to volunteer to coach like there used to be.
“And so what happens is, you have a great program somewhere and that teacher decides to retire ... we don't have people coming in to replace them. And when you don't have staff, teacher-coaches, programs fold.
"A good buddy of mine, old school coach, he said to me, 'when I first started up, I couldn't be the senior boys coach. There's five guys waiting in line to do it. Like, I would pretty much have to stab the guy in the back to get his job. Nowadays, someone's walking down the street and (the school says), 'Hey, man, would you come coach our senior boys basketball team?’
“And unfortunately, there's a lot of truth to that. It's just a different environment we’re in now. So we really do need community coaches, and I wish that our districts would be a bit more supportive of that. Some of the school districts just aren't.
“The high school game, (it’s) never been more popular. We have like almost 300 schools playing in boys and girls, for the most part. But I would say we're on a bit of a lifeline. Schools are still putting out they're still doing their best to have teams, but it's getting harder and harder, and we're slowly going to start losing programs and teams.
“We're in trouble. We're hanging in there though, and our numbers are still good. But you know ... it's teetering. Unless we find a way to get more support for coaches, and find more teacher-coaches, yeah, I think we could become Kodak.
“I don't think we're there yet. But it's close.”
Another gust of gale force wind driving high school hoops towards the rocks has been the rise of club basketball, which has supplanted the traditional route as the top developmental path for players with post-secondary playing ambitions.
Club basketball used to be the upstart, the scofflaws who provided an unnecessary service that sapped time away from the real programs, and were derided as a glorified intramurals. Now the roles are close to being flipped.
“I wouldn't say (school basketball has become) glorified intramurals — yet,” said DRIVE Academy found Pasha Bains. “I still think there's depth, a lot of energy and school spirit. Social media has helped obviously with that in terms of these kids still getting a lot of attention and the crowds haven't dissipated.
“But the biggest issue is a lack of coaching and lack of support. It's not like how it used to be. There's only very few schools that actually, you know, try nowadays.
“And that's why the clubs are doing more and more. The high school scene, it's watered down. It’s definitely not like it used to be. ... But I don't think high school basketball will go anywhere. It might just look a little bit different.”
The competitive contraction to a much smaller group of schools, as Hanson alluded to, is a self-propagating, self-defeating trend course.
“I think that's already happened on the girls’ side,” said Bains. “These girls can't play anybody because they'll win by 80, so the same teams just play each other over and over and over. It's almost already a prep school. So every weekend, and every tournament, there'll be the same teams playing each other, because if they play anybody else, they'll beat them by 80, so there's no point.”
Case in point: The Riverside Rapids. The PoCo school played in its third straight 4A girls B.C. final last week, facing off with the Seaquam Seahawks, a team they’d already faced twice in tournament play. The Seahawks, stacked with seven players from AthElite Basketball, won the title against an equally star-studded Rapids team. Riverside’s Avery Sussex is heading south to UC-Davis to play upon graduation.
Semiahmoo grad Tara Wallack, who won two B.C. crowns before getting a scholarship to play at Washington State, saw club basketball as the most efficient way of getting where she wanted to go: the NCAA.
"The biggest difference between high school basketball and club basketball is high school tends to be a lot of girls who just play for fun, whereas club basketball girls play because that’s their No. 1 sport or see a future in it and want to get recruited,” she said. “Since a lot of club tournaments have recruiters at (them), travel is another big thing, (with) club usually travelling every weekend, where high school is locally or one big trip each year.
" ... You can still get recruited in high school, but it’s way harder to get noticed by American schools. ... Club was easier for these recruiters to see us first-hand and create a relationship with us after that.”
With the post-secondary target in mind, another factor in the dilution of the high school ranks has been the lure of the prep academy, increasingly leaching away the top senior talents.
One coach put the number at 26 — 23 boys, three girls — who left B.C. for prep school in Alberta, Ontario or the U.S. last year.
There are talents like Xavier McLean, a 6-foot-7 wing from Vancouver, but his name holds little local recognition since he’s been balling at Orangeville Prep in Ontario.
University coaches, both above and south of the border, are putting less and less emphasis on high school recruiting. With prep going to Grade 13 — they are, after all, traditional college preparation institutions — the players are older and more physically developed, and they play consistently elite competition.
And that’s not even getting to university; in post-secondary, many colleges and universities aren’t even looking in schools anymore; they’re recruiting from the transfer portal.
“They're kind of bringing a knife to a gunfight,” Bains said of local players with post-secondary aspirations.
“They're already not in a hotbed of basketball here. We don't have the same competition level or talent that Toronto does or the States does. So they're already kind of put against the wall in that sense.”
Hanson only has a single high school freshman on his roster — Elgin Park’s Adam Olsen — and zero Canadian college (CCAA) transfers.
“When I first started at UBC, we were recruiting three or four players a year under the CCAA. Now many of those schools have now joined Canada West, and so there's fewer and fewer,” he said. “So the tide has really changed. The industry has changed. We would love nothing more than to have great high school players ... but it's tough when you have eight universities in B.C. that are recruiting the kids, and we're losing many of the top kids to the prep school.
“We are losing them at younger and younger ages now, with the prep schools down in the States, the prep schools that are starting to sprout up in Western Canada. ... Before, early on, I used to be opposed to it. But now ... it's hard for us not to recruit out of the prep schools. They’re one or two years older, they've been in the weight room, they've been away from home, they started out academics and sorted out their social lives a little bit.
“To be a top 10 program in the country, you need to have older, stronger, bigger, fast athletic guys.”
But it also cuts the other way. University programs are only taking the absolute best players, regardless of where they’re coming from. Of the 530,446 seniors playing basketball in the U.S. in 2023, only a shade under 5,000 made it to the Div. 1 ranks. That’s less than one per cent.
And if you’re Canadian, the odds are even smaller. You’re competing against peers who are usually reclassified to a later year, are raised and steeped in the gladiatorial U.S. sporting culture, and lack the frequent in-person exposure players in, or close to, the large U.S. urban centres.
It’s why, when it comes to following the trend of transferring to play prep ball for your final two years of high school, it’s not worth it, said Eberhardt.
“What I'll tell you, and again, I'm not gonna hold any punches back on this, but that whole notion that a kid needs to go to a prep school or academy or club to become is bullshit. The facts don't bear that out. They don’t,” he said. “It really bothers me. Kids who leave early because they don't think playing for their high school will help them. ... (But) the numbers I've come up with, I think for 95 per cent of them, it doesn't work. They come home. They're discouraged. They had a bad experience. They spent all this money for nothing.
“If you finish your high school, and then after ... maybe you’ve got to work on your body a bit, maybe you're not big or strong enough yet. OK, that's fine. Go to a prep school, or go to an academy to sharpen your skills and see if that can help you get that scholarship.
“I know several kids who did that and actually have had quite a bit of success. But this whole notion that you somehow you have to leave is just wrong. And I think we're doing a tremendous disservice to kids telling them this, because of the numbers don't bear out. It’s a mistake, and kids need to know that.”
He also had some harsh words for some of the clubs and programs that are focused on a business model — one that sells dreams. One that convinces parents scholarships are easily attainable with enough training in their program.
Only a few programs in B.C. have an established track record of placing their players into post-secondary situations.
“This is a thing that I get very, very angry at. We have a lot of clubs who are promising things to kids that are just not right,” said Eberhardt. “It boggles my mind and parents need to educate themselves because we’re lucky in this province if we produce one Div. 1 player a year or two — that's just the numbers.
“I'm not trying to crush kids’ dreams and I think it's great that they set high goals and want to try to get a Div. 1 scholarship, but we have to be realistic.
“When we're telling kids, 13-year-olds like, 'oh yeah, you're one of the top 10 players in Canada and come with us and we'll get you this next level.' It's so disingenuous, and it's wrong. If you're not seven foot and you live here in B.C., the chances of you playing Div. 1 basketball are minuscule.
“We have great players here. But they're a dime a dozen down in the States. It really frustrates me that adults are, in my opinion, selling a real false dream for parents to pay money to go to these clubs because this club is going to get them some Div. 1 scholarship.”
As detrimental as the bad faith actors in the industry can be, the clubs with the resources, track record — and especially coaches — will continue to thrive and the incessant attrition of the roots of high school basketball will continue. Most school districts will remain steadfast in their reluctance to financially support the programs in the way they are needed.
But, just like Kodak, which has found an existence marketing a niche product to photography purists, high school hoops will never wither away completely. March at the Langley Events Centre will confirm that.
The boys B.C. basketball championships remains immensely popular. Last year’s run of title games was sold out, and standing-room only, and the upcoming edition is expected to match that. There’s something electric and unmatched about playing in front of a crowd, to be representative of an entire community and not just a club. It produces memories. Engraves lessons of character and triumph.
“It’s a big deal. It's the most important thing we have, the boys and girls tournaments, because kids want to play in it, and coaches want to be part of it,” said Eberhardt. “It really helps to drive the interest up and keep people that are still wanting to do it.
“That is still a marquee event. It's still probably considered the best amateur sporting event in the country. So we need to keep that going, because that really helps us promote and keep kids in the game. For whatever reason, it's retained its importance.”
Even the coaches or entrepreneurs who started academies will fondly remember basketball in high school not just for the games, but everything around it.
“Just looking at my team,” Eberhardt said of his Highlanders, “these guys have all known each other since Grade 8 and 9. They're buddies. I've got a few guys who are really good. And I got a bunch of role players who will never play a day after the season's over ... When they (graduate), whether it be in a basketball team, or rugby team or a drama or whatever, those are the experiences that they're going to remember. Those are the things that mean a lot to them. And you can't replicate that in the club system. You just can't.
“Ultimately that's really the biggest value that we offer for kids — the opportunity to learn all these great lessons about how life works, but to be with your (oldest) friends. That's something that we will always should be able to offer kids.”
Wallack agreed, and wouldn’t trade her time with the Totems for anything, listing her back-to-back title winning seasons as some of her most cherished memories.
“Yes, it’s definitely worth it,” she said of playing high school ball. “Some of my best memories from high school, I created them with my best friends to this day. And some my best memories with my teammates had nothing to do with basketball. I think it’s about the friendships (and) connections that truly make high school special.”
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