A big serving of breakfast basketball – topped off with a sweet performance from star point guard Georgia Swant – helped the Argyle Pipers win the junior girls provincial championships last week at Langley Events Centre.
Swant was sublime in Argyle’s 71-65 win over Langley’s Walnut Grove Gators, scoring an incredible 44 points while also dishing out five assists – all in a game that lasted just 32 minutes. The biggest play of all, however, may have come on the defensive end where Swant took a charge against Walnut Grove superstar Tavia Rowell with less than two minutes left in the game. The defensive stop gave the ball back to the Pipers with a 68-65 lead that they never relinquished and it also handed Rowell her fifth foul, sending her out of the game.
“I’ve never had a player score that many points before,” said head coach Anthony Beyrouti, who has been coaching on the North Shore for more than a decade. “But then to also get the assists and get the charge on top of the points, it makes it even cooler.”
Swant was the star of the final but the team has been building up steam all season long, thanks in part to optional early-morning workouts, said Beyrouti.
“We’ve done something called breakfast club at our school where kids would come shooting at 7:15 in the morning twice a week,” he said. “It was totally optional but we started with four kids, then we got to five kids. By the time we got to our last session we had 10 kids out. High school kids find every reason not to come out at 7:15 in the morning to shoot, (but) our kids bought into it and they came out and they did the work and it paid off at the end of the season.”
The Pipers came into provincials ranked fourth and battled their way into the seminfinals where they were matched up against No. 1-ranked Lord Tweedsmuir from Surrey.
The Pipers were cruising to an upset but trouble brewed when Swant fouled out of the game with six minutes left. The top-ranked Panthers seemed poised to pounce, but the Pipers held on to their lead thanks to some inspired last-minute play from Chloe Walton, the coach said.
“Chloe took the reins and helped get us to the final,” said Beyrouti. “She really made a huge impact for our team.”
After beating the No. 1 team, the Pipers had the pleasure of facing No. 2 Walnut Grove in the final.
“We came into the tournament thinking we could win the thing but we also knew that we weren’t the favourites to do it,” said Beyrouti. “We had an underdog mentality to us and it was good for the kids – they played with a little bit of a chip on their shoulder and they executed the game plans flawlessly. We took care of business.”
Walton and Teagan Mackay took turns guarding Rowell who had torched earlier opponents. Rowell still dropped a hard-earned 24 points in the final but it was her lowest point total of the tournament.
“She’s a hell of a player,” Beyrouti said. “To do what (Walton and MacKay) did is unbelievable. It’s a 1-2 punch. It’s one thing if you’ve got one kid who can guard the ball, but then when you put two people who can really guard the ball, it allows for some pretty cool things to happen.”
Argyle got into some foul trouble in the game, which shifted the scoring load further onto Swant’s shoulders, said Beyrouti.
“That’s what we needed from her,” he said. “She goes out of her way to get everybody involved and she really wants to achieve big things. … We had some foul trouble, we used a lot of the clock on a lot of our possessions to try to limit the amount of defence we had to play. We ended up going 1-4 low for her a lot, but that was mostly to keep our big kids out of foul trouble. To keep everybody in the game we needed her to (score), and she did and she was fantastic, obviously.”
Swant actually played on the Argyle senior team last year as a Grade 9 player so that she could suit up beside her sister Sophie, who is now a first-year player carving out a nice role on the Simon Fraser University team. This year, however, the Argyle coaches decided to drop Georgia back down to junior to play with her cohort, a strong group of Grade 10 players.
“We’re trying to change the culture of the school so we thought it would be in everyone’s best interest to keep the kids together and really getting them working hard and buying into the culture that we’re trying to set,” said Beyrouti. “We’ve got a couple other very talented kids as well and we’ve kept them all together and said let’s see how we can do as a group.”
They obviously did well this year, winning the North Shore, Lower Mainland and provincial titles. Swant was named provincial tournament MVP while Brianna Joyce was named to the first all-star team.
The junior showing bodes well for the future of the Argyle senior program, said Beyrouti.
“We’re very exited,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of strong seniors coming back, so to add to them the strong Grade 10s, it’ll make a good team for next year for sure.”
