The senior boys’ Charles Hays Secondary School (CHSS) Rainmakers knew they’d have a tough test in front of them, travelling to Vancouver to take part in the Pitt Meadows Air Show basketball tournament.
But they quickly got a taste of how tough.
Made up of mostly quad-A schools (the highest level of high school basketball), the AAA team from Prince Rupert was blitzed by some terrific basketball teams including the number-one quad-A team in the province, Terry Fox Ravens on Wednesday night before the tourney got underway, losing to the Ravens 82-38 without two of their starters including Justin McChesney.
The first game of the Air Show had the ‘Makers facing the team who stole their No. 3 rank in the AAA B.C. power rankings, the Sir Charles Tupper Tigers, and the now No. 4-ranked Rupert boys fell 55-51.
The ‘Makers then found themselves in the championship round despite the loss, based on points, and took on the quad-A No. 6 Sir Winston Churchill Bulldogs and lost 82-44 with the entire bench seeing action in the game.
Saturday’s fifth-place game saw the ‘Makers put up 59 points, but their opposition, the quad-A No. 9 Mt. Boucherie Bears from Kelowna, sank 104 points of their own in Rupert’s final game of the tourney – the 104-59 loss in which foul trouble cost CHSS the game.
Churchill won the overall tournament and CHSS took sixth-place, while going 0-4 against the top teams in the province during the week. The host Pitt Meadows team garnered second.