Colburn Pearce has devised different ways to dominate on the basketball court.
He can get hot with his shooting and score 50 points in a game, like he did for the Duchess Park Condors early in the season in Kamloops.
Or he can play the setup role like he did in Saturday’s triple-A boys zone championship game against the Prince George Polars, dissecting his opponents quickly by threading eye-of-the needle passes through traffic to put the ball in the hands of his teammates staring down open looks at the net.
Either way, Pearce is a handful to try to stop and this year it seems nobody can do that effectively for very long. The underdog Polars played the game of their lives for the first half of Saturday’s final and limited Pearce to just four points in the half. But as good as they were shutting down one of the top shooters in the province, PGSS was powerless to prevent Pearce from finding his friends on the court.
On this night it was Cody Boulding, who used his height and leaping ability to score 28 points and lead the Condors to a 102-77 win. Nobody was keeping track of assists but if they were, Pearce probably had close to 20.
“He makes everyone better,” said Condors guard Malcolm MacDonald. “I’ve played with him since Grade 2 and he’s the most freakish athlete I’ve ever met, you cannot stop the kid. He changes the game with everything because everyone has to look at him and that opens everything up. He’s so confident, he can put the ball in and pass and just control the game whenever he wants to.”
Pearce began firing the ball more often in the second half and finished with 15 points, while Dan Zimmerman delivered 17 points and Soren Erricson finished with 11.
“My teammates set me up perfectly and our defence fuels our offence,” said Boulding. “Colburn is a lethal scorer but he showed us today that’s he’s very good at setting up people too. He made his team look fantastic.
“PGSS has come a long way since the first time we played them.”
Condors head coach Jordan Yu agreed.
“We know PGSS has the talent to beat anybody on any given night and we had to come prepared and our boys were well-prepared for that,” said Yu. “It was a game of runs, it was a close game and we just had to battle. Our goal tonight was to not take a possession off and for the most part our guys did that.”
Ameer Dhillon played the entire 40 minutes for the Polars and was rewarded for his efforts with a 26-point game. Gabe Black, a Team B.C. under-15 provincial team player last summer, hit for 24 points and Asher Bourque also gave the Condors trouble, collecting 23 points.
The Polars were at their best in the first quarter and were within a three-pointer of tying it. Dhillon’s long-range accuracy (he had three of his six threes in the second quarter) and Black’s can’t-miss foul shooting prompted a late second-quarter surge and the Polars crept back to make it a 10-point game at halftime, trailing 46-36.
“They’re a pretty deep team and they’re hard to keep up with,” said Dhillon. “There’s not much you can do when they have five city all-stars on the team. I feel like that was our best game of the season in the first half and we just had a couple errors in the second half and there’s not much we can do about it; they’re a great team.”
The Condors were much better at moving the ball to get around the Polars’ zone defence in the second half and at the same time, PGSS’s shooters went cold. By three-quarter time the Condors led 70-52 and the Polars never recovered.
“We gave our defence an assignment to play a zone because they have such great shooters and I thought we did phenomenally well,” said Polars head coach Manbeer Singh, whose team will lose just two Grade 12 players to graduation. “Duchess did a great job on adjusting and using their high post and their low post to take advantage of our zone defence. Our two bottom guys really made them work.”
Brevin Gervais, the Condors’ honorary captain, who has steadily recovered from a life-threatening brain aneurysm a year ago, came off the Duchess Park bench to accept the championship trophy, which dates back to 1958.
The Condors played three quad-A schools at the Harry Ainlay tournament the week before in Edmonton and they were well-tuned to come up with their best game of the weekend to clinch the zone title.
The Condors beat the Polars 83-57 earlier in the double-knockout tournament.
“PGSS definitely came out energized and even though they lost the first game they still felt they had 100 per cent chance of winning,” said Pearce. “Nothing’s for granted in basketball and we knew that and they knew that, so we just had to match whatever energy they put in because we knew they would come out all-in as the underdogs.
“I just like to get into the flow of the game and if it turns out the flow works out well scoring, then I’ll take it. But in this game it just so happened that all my teammates were always in better spots and more open and that’s fine too because it’s a team game.”
Pearce has scholarship offers to play football at UBC or he could stay home and red-shirt one season playing basketball with the UNBC Timberwolves. The choice is up to him and he says he won’t make up his mind until after basketball season ends.
The Condors will head to Langley for the triple-A provincial championship tournament which starts March 7 in Langley. They are ranked sixth in the province.
“If we play like we have in the last three games and in practices the last week, all of the Lower Mainland teams who don’t think we can compete, we should give them a run for their money,” said Boulding.
The tournament all-stars were: First Team – Erricson, Boulding, and Garret Anderson of the Condors; and Polars Black and Dhillon. Second Team – MacDonald and Zimmerman of Duchess Park; and Bourque, Martin Saa and Jordan Fisher of PGSS.
