PAST: Sir Winston Churchill Bulldogs
PRESENT: Langara YMCA
FUTURE: CIS UBC Thunderbirds
His season started with a checklist. By the end, he’d smothered the list in checkmarks.
Mindy Minhas, this year’s most exciting basketball player and the AAAA B.C. championship MVP, started the campaign by drawing up a list of the things he cared about most. Each day he looked at the list he pinned overhead on the ceiling of his bedroom. He wanted to win the city and zone finals. He wanted the provincial title.
Was MVP on his list? “Yes, it was,” said Minhas. “It’s been there since Grade 8.”
The Bulldog got them all. And with Churchill and head coach Rick Lopez, Minhas played an outstanding second half to clinch the provincial championship. He scored seven points in the first quarter, sat on the bench in the second and returned after the half to play the determined and passionate game he’s known for.
He finished with 30 points, more than the 24.6 he averaged during the season.
“That second half was some of the best basketball I’ve ever seen a kid play in that tournament,” said Pasha Bains, the co-founder of Drive Basketball where Minhas has trained since elementary school. “Mindy is one of the most memorable players that the tournament has had.”
“He was having fun,” added Churchill coach Lopez. In the second half, Minhas, who committed to play for the UBC Thunderbirds before the start of his Grade 12 year, shot a three-pointer right in front of the bench, turning before the ball dropped to mouth the word, “Bank.”
“Yes, he banked it in,” said Lopez. “After it went in, he looked at me and pointed and we both had a good laugh as he ran down the court to play D.”
It was Lopez who inspired Minhas’s checklist. “I wanted to see my goals every day,” said the 18-year-old player who rose early for nearly five years to shoot hoops at the Langara YMCA, often with his dad.
Minhas, a role model for the young Bulldogs still at Churchill in addition to Sikh athletes around B.C., will never stop working to get better, said Bains.
The Drive coach knew about the checklist and the desire to win the B.C. championship. “He’d send me a picture of each time when he’d cross one off,” said Bains. “He has a very secure place in B.C. tournament history. One of the greatest things is that his name will forever be in the record books with Steve Nash and all the other great MPVs that have come along.”
Check.
