Caleb Lyons couldn't think of a better way to celebrate his 16th birthday.
Not only did he get his hands on the City League senior boys basketball championship trophy after his Duchess Park Condors defeated the D.P. Todd Trojans 64-55 in the final Wednesday night at the Northern Sport Centre but Lyons played a starring role.
The Grade 10 guard had his radar well-honed and scored a team-high 19 points, continuing on the success that helped stake the Condors to their status as the No. 4-ranked triple-A team in the province.
"I was just feeling it - it was just a big game and I really wanted to play well," said Lyons. "We knew it was going to be a close game and we talked about not getting overconfident and just play our game.
"I'm getting way more confident on the court, I think confidence is the big thing. It was a good win but provincials is what we're looking for."
Lyons came up big for the Condors last weekend in Edmonton at a Harry Ainley tournament. He had one 28-point game and scored 16 in the final, a loss to the host team.
The six-foot-three senior team rookie has Duchess Park pedigree running through his veins. His mother Reena is part of the Yu clan that struck basketball gold on numerous occasions playing for the Condors and in university basketball. His uncles, Jordan and Lee-Wei Yu, now coach the Condors and his other uncle, Nathan, is playing professional hoops in Hong Kong.
"He's had an up-and-down kind of season but the last three weeks he's been skyrocketing, exponentially getting better," said head coach Jordan Yu. "He was our star player in Edmonton and we're trying to keep it going.
"He has some really good genes, his dad is six-foot-five, and Caleb's getting up there. He didn't get that height from me."
In a closely-contested game that went back-and-forth with four lead changes in the third quarter, the Condors built a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter but the Trojans came armed with some deadly shooters - Saager Shergill, Randy Sandhu, Cameron Sale and Shane Sandhu - and kept finding ways to get within a couple shots of tying it. Key strikes from Soren Erricson and Lyons finally sealed it.
"We came out and we knew it was going to be a bit of a grinder game," said Erricson, a Grade 12 guard. "We've been playing some good basketball lately and came out a bit slow and had some lapses in the second quarter. At halftime, the whole thing was come out and play some defence and get the ball rolling but and in the third we kind of turned it around and started getting on the runs and the whole mindset in the fourth was to hold them with that 10-point lead and stop their runs."
In the senior girls City League final, played earlier Wednesday, the Duchess Park Condors won their sixth-straight title, beating the College Heights Cougars 72-25.
Erricson will have his name engraved on the trophy for the fourth straight year (he was still in Grade 8 when the Condors started their five-year run as City League champs). He and Isaac Northrop, Graydon Wolitski, Dan Zimmerman and Sam Istok are all in their senior years.
"It's definitely nice having the win as a Grade 12, it's a tribute to my last year and all the other Grade 12s on the team," Erricson said. "It definitely feels pretty nice."
Trojans coach Greg Sale thought the Condors showed more energy over longer stretches than his team, enough to make a difference. With just nine players to work with, fatigue had to be setting in for D.P. Todd late in the game.
"They executed down the stretch and we didn't do the little things right, we didn't box out, we didn't rebound particularly well the whole game and they outworked us," said Sale. "I told my guys that if we make provincials, hopefully they'll learn from these types of games. We can't let that happen, we have to be the team that works harder and executes down the stretch."
Trojans post Chris Magrath rolled his ankle 86 seconds into Wednesday's game when he jumped up for a shot and came down on Jackson Kuc's foot. Magrath sat out a few plays but came back right away and his six-foot-seven height under the boards was a huge factor in keeping D.P. Todd in the game. He agreed with his coach that his team did not come up with its best effort and Condors took advantage.
"This was the most important game of the year for most of us and we just wanted to go out there and battle our hardest and I think we did, it's just that we didn't finish as well as we should have," said Magrath. "They finished and made their shots better than we did. They were the better team tonight. They were coming for those rebounds a lot harder than we were a lot of the time and it does come into factor that we are playing with a seven-guy bench."
The Trojans are ranked fifth in B.C. among double-A teams and will be hosting the zone tournament at D.P. Todd next week. The Condors will play in the North Central triple-A zone tournament which starts next week at PGSS.
