Rick Lopez has had the conversation with his boys. The coach of the defending AAAA B.C. Champion Churchill Bulldogs has talked to the teenage players about the pressure they’ll face this season, which amped up when they opened the pre-season as the top-ranked team in the province.
“We’ve talked a lot about it,” said Lopez. “We talked a lot about how hard it is to repeat. There are so many good programs, so many good coaches, so many good players — what’s going to make us different? What are we doing to make things work for us again?”
The Bulldogs debuted on The Province’s B.C. rankings at No. 1 and in the second week, topped the charts again. When the numbers come out tomorrow, there will be significant shifts among the top 10.
“We’re not going to be No. 1 next week,” said Lopez on Monday after a city league win over the Hamber Griffins. The Bulldogs will not be at the top and could drop out of the top three. On the rise, from fifth to fourth to somewhere higher this week, is Vancouver College, who knocked Churchill out of the Heritage Woods Invitational Saturday in an 87-72 win.
The first 2014-15 ranking were released Nov. 24 and are compiled by high school coaches and Province reporter Howard Tsumura. New rankings come out each Wednesday.
A loss can mean a team refocuses, humbled by what — on paper at least — appears to be an upset or just the end of a streak before the could-have-been wins piled up. A No. 5 knocking off No. 1 is a fair fight, but the loss can shift the pressure just enough so a team like Churchill can keep being itself because it’s moved from the centre of every other team’s crosshairs.
Lopez has a specific way of describing this shift.
“We were talking about it, saying, ‘Do you want to be the hunter or the hunted?’ We’re not going to be hunted anymore because we lost a couple games to good teams and now we’ve got to regroup, get healthy and fire back,” he said.
Although Lopez knows how the Bulldogs can benefit, the goal was never to lose and that remains unchanged.
“We entered that tournament wanting to win it. Don’t get me wrong, we wanted to win,” he said. “But we’ll come away and focus on how to get back to where we want to be.”
Besides, said the coach, there isn’t a senior boys basketball team in B.C. that won’t change considerably between now and February, when league playoffs begin. The No. 1 AAAA team at the start of the 2013-14 season finished seventh at provincials, he recalled.
Since winning the 2014 title at the expanded AAAA tier, Churchill has seen key forward and provincial tournament MVP Mindy Minhas graduate. The core of the team are its Grade 11 players, including Karn Virk, Lambert Pajayon, Harry Lui and Gary Minhas, who is in Grade 12, all who dazzled as juniors and finished third in 2012 before moving up to the senior team last year as Grade 10 students.
Another core player, Izaiah Ugoalah, is off the roster since he left B.C. to play at Sunrise Christian Academy, a private prep school in Kansas. Ugoalah is missed, but Lopez said he supports the player’s decision to move south.
“I’m happy for the guy and I’m proud for him because that was a dream of his,” said the coach.
And if he wants to come back, we’ll welcome him at Churchill. You have to chase your dream and you don’t want to have any regrets. He got that opportunity and what a great opportunity.”
Back in B.C., the Bulldogs are striving to realize their top-flight stature, but Lopez says they take nothing for granted.
“To win a game against a top-10 team in this province is hard. To consistently do it, you gotta be ready and prepared to work,” he said. “We have a bunch of young guys and they’re going to take some bumps and learn along the way. That’s part of growing. You’re not going to win every single game. As much as these guys think they could or expect to, that’s not reality, especially when you’re playing some really, really good teams. You’re going to lose. That’s what makes you stronger. You go out, you learn what you did right, what you did wrong, and you come back and do it again.”
If they do it all again, the Bulldogs repeat.
But no pressure.
