Sixteen games, 16 wins.
The Duchess Park Condors kept their undefeated season intact when they ran to a 4-0 record at a weekend senior girls basketball tournament in Kamloops. At the 12-team event, co-hosted by Sa-Hali and NorKam, the Condors faced the Vernon Panthers in Saturday's championship game and won 70-54.
Vernon started the weekend as the third-ranked team in the provincial double-A division and Duchess Park was unranked in the same category. But rankings meant nothing once the game started because the Panthers couldn't handle the Condors' swarming defence and multi-faceted offence. The determined Duchess squad had a 12-point cushion by the latter stages of the first half, and, when Vernon scored the final six points of the half, that just served as additional fuel for the Condors.
"We just upped the tempo even more," said Al Erricson, who co-coaches the Condors with Bruce Ballantyne. "We kept rotating everyone through and [the Panthers] just couldn't take the pressure and the intensity we were able to put at them. We had an outstanding team win."
While the Condors used all 13 players on their roster, the Panthers went with a much shorter bench.
After the game, Grade 10 guard Madison Landry was chosen as the tournament's most valuable player and Grade 12 forward Carly Frenkel was picked as an all-star. Landry was fierce on defence all weekend and also scored an average of 15 points per outing. As for Frenkel, she was the team's most consistent performer.
"She played a really steady game all four games," Erricson said.
With the tournament victory -- their third of the season -- the Condors moved up to No. 7 in the provincial rankings.
In their other weekend games, they beat Princess Margaret of Penticton 68-46, downed York House of Vancouver 61-39 and defeated Sa-Hali 74-44.
The Duchess Park roster is rounded out by Marcie Schlick, a Grade 10 post player who is almost six-foot-four, fellow Grade 10 Nicola Erricson, Grade 11s Shanna Olsen, Kayla Auld, Emily Holmes, Addison Fawcett, Lydia Myatovic and Riley Brennan and Grade 12s Carly Shaw-MacLaren, Carlee Rerick and Alexis Schlick. The majority of the Duchess players were part of last season's junior team that claimed bronze at the provincial championship tournament.
Next up for the Condors is a city league game tonight (8 p.m.) at D.P. Todd. At the end of the month, they'll head to the Okanagan for games against South Kamloops, MEI, Vernon and Penticton. South Kamloops is currently No. 1 in B.C. in the triple-A division and MEI, from Abbotsford, is eighth.
Two other local teams -- the College Heights Cougars and PGSS Polars -- attended the Sa-Hali/NorKam tournament. The Cougars finished seventh and the Polars were 10th.
