If winning back-to-back championships was easy, more teams would do it.
The UNBC Northern Timberwolves were shooting for repeat gold at the Canadian Colleges Athletic Association men's basketball nationals but instead struggled to a 1-2 record. The T-wolves finished the tournament with a one-sided Saturday loss to the Mount Saint Vincent University Mystics of Halifax, who beat them 84-49.
At nationals, in Oshawa, Ont., UNBC opened with an 81-66 setback to the Lethbridge College Kodiaks and then downed the host Durham College Lords 72-67.
The Timberwolves, champions last year in Calgary, were looking to be the first repeat winner since the 1998-99 Langara College Falcons.
"National tournaments are tough and when you're talking about doing it two years in a row, that's something that's done so rarely," said first-year UNBC head coach Todd Jordan. "It's an extremely difficult thing to do. It was unfortunate that we kind of hit a slump this weekend, at the worst possible time, but I guess that's just the way it went.
"It's disappointing that we couldn't have performed better," Jordan added. "We're not going to make any excuses for it. I talked to the guys afterwards and just said we didn't shoot the ball very well but we have to take a look in the mirror. [This week] I'll sit down with everybody individually and we'll sit down as a team and we'll reflect back and look at some things over the course of the year that maybe we could have done better and some areas that we could have improved upon. Hopefully next year it just makes me a better coach and makes these guys a stronger team."
Against the Mystics, things went badly right from the start. The Timberwolves were down 24-7 after the first quarter and never recovered. Their 49 points represented a season low. In league play here in B.C., the team averaged 92.5 points per game.
"Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong," Jordan said of being manhandled by the Mystics.
"We didn't have a ton of energy defensively and, compounding that, was the fact that on the other end [the Mystics] did a good job defensively. We really struggled and we became tighter and tighter as the game went on. Then it seemed like there was a lid on the rim. For them to hold us to 49 points, that's unheard of for us."
At last year's nationals, UNBC eliminated Mount Saint Vincent from gold-medal contention with an 80-58 win in the semifinal round. The Timberwolves went on to beat the host SAIT Trojans 96-63 for gold.
Saturday's game was the last in the college careers of guards Matt Mills and Inderbir Gill. The 24-year-old Gill walked off the court as one of the most decorated athletes in CCAA history. He was a three-time All-Canadian, MVP of the 2010 nationals, the 2009-10 CCAA male athlete of the year and the 2010-11 CCAA player of the year for basketball. At these nationals, he was picked as a second-team all-star.
"Those guys are both top-class kids and I'm sure they're going to be successful in whatever they go on to," Jordan said of Mills and Gill.
Gill, a Spokane resident who will graduate from UNBC next month with a finance degree, hopes to continue basketball at the professional level.
"We obviously hope that he can do it and we'll help him out any way we can," Jordan said.
"[UNBC consultant] Ken Shields has said he might be able to get him at least a tryout with a Japanese team and there's a team, the Seattle Mountaineers [of the American Basketball Association]. But nothing more than 'you can come and try out for us' has been established yet."
In the gold-medal game at nationals, the seventh-ranked Vanier College Cheetahs beat fifth-ranked Lethbridge 102-85. Meanwhile, the top-seeded Vancouver Island University Mariners edged the sixth-ranked Mystics 73-71 for bronze.
