Emotions ran high at the Mallaig School gym on Tuesday afternoon, as two senior high boys’ basketball teams went head to head for the 2015 St. Paul Athletics Association (SPAA) championship title.
It was a close game for the most part, with Elk Point’s F.G. Miller Crusaders eventually claiming the win and the SPAA banner. The Mallaig Stingers would walk away with the silver medal.
“It feels good,” said Bonnie Fairbairn, head coach of the F.G. Miller squad. She says it’s been a long time since the school brought home a SPAA basketball banner. Fairbairn has been coaching the boys’ team for two seasons, and in the short time has seen huge growth.
There was “a lot of practice. A lot of hard work,” put in this season, she says, and admits that Tuesday’s game was a perfect example of working hard.
“(The boys) had to work hard. Mallaig’s a really good team.” And although a couple of the players stood out to Fairbairn on Tuesday afternoon, in the end, achieving a championship is a team effort.
“To be completely honest, we were very excited and thrilled to make it to the SPAA final this season,” says Steven Jeffery, head coach of the Stingers. “The boys should be extremely proud of the growth they've achieved in such a short amount of time.”
Jeffery says that as coaches, he and his wife couldn't have ask for a more determined and rewarding group to be a part of.
“In the beginning it was all about hard work and learning quickly. We only asked that they gave us as much effort as they could and pushed themselves when it was needed.”
It took a lot of tough practices and close games for the Stingers to hit their stride, but eventually they felt they could compete for the SPAA banner, which they certainly did.
“We had great match ups with F.G. Miller this season, and they gave us an awesome battle in the final. They did a good job of stopping our shooting game and forced us to go to work inside,” says Jeffery.
Girls
On the girls’ side, the F.G. Miller Crusaders wouldn’t be quite as successful in achieving a banner, falling to the Glendon Marquise by a margin of about 30 points, representatives from the Crusaders and Glendon were quick to praise the efforts of Elk Point’s team.
“We had a great season,” says F.G. Miller assistant coach Kari Sundt. The team was made up of only five girls, which is exactly the number needed to play. The girls had to train hard and do a lot of running at practice to make sure they would be in top-notch shape to play an entire basketball game without any extra players.
One player specifically, Lee-Anna Gibson, would often get to school at 7 a.m., early every morning, to practice, even when the team didn’t have practice, says Sundt, which speaks to the dedication and commitment of the team.
The girls were “very committed . . . and very strong athletes.”
Daryn Galatiuk, the athletic director at Glendon School, says that despite what the score might show, “F.G. Miller fought hard the entire way and there was no give-up.” He says he was very impressed by the Crusaders and that they were able to make it to the league final with only five players on the team.
As for his own school’s team, Galatiuk says Glendon had a “very strong core group of seniors that kind of run the show.” The four Grade 12 students on the team are “exceptionally strong players,” and the team was ranked in the top 10 provincially for 1A schools the entire season.
“At the end of the day, there were smiles all around,” says Galatiuk of Tuesday’s game, adding, it was a very sportsmanlike game.
