Sporting Madness

Maybe the SFU Clan had the Olympics on their mind this afternoon, as they fell 63-61 [ Mike Tucker , UVic Sports Information] on the road to the sixth-ranked University of Victoria Vikes in their final league game. It would be all too easy to see the Vikes' upset of the top-ranked Clan as some sort of game-changing moment for CIS women's basketball, but there's more to it than that. The Clan had won 49 straight games , or 54 if you count the playoffs , so it's certainly noteworthy that someone finally found a way to beat them. In truth, though, this probably just shows that Canada West is about more than just SFU. As the most recent Top 10 rankings show , the conference is absolutely stacked in women's basketball. They have No.1 SFU, No.2 Regina, No.4 Saskatchewan, No.6 Victoria, No.8 Alberta and No.10 UBC, six out of the ten slots. Back in 2008, I wrote a piece for the Queen's Journal about the West's dominance in men's volleyball. What I wasn...

Some interesting news coming out of Langley these days. Trinity Western University announced that they've settled with former men's basketball coach Stan Peters. Peters, who was dismissed Dec. 13 after the Spartans got off to a 4-8 start, filed a wrongful dismissal lawsuit against the university last month as Gary Ahuja of the Langley Times reported. His suit claimed that his firing was only the second time a CIS men's basketball coach had ever been let go in the middle of a season. Terms of the settlement weren't released. Peters had gone on a solid run with the Spartans since joining the program in 1999: his team made the Canada West playoffs four out of the last five years, and he won a Canada West bronze medal and the Canada West Coach of the Year award in 2003. He's also an experienced coach, with 21 years of coaching at colleges and universities under his belt. To my knowledge, this year was expected to be a bit of a rebuilding one for the Spartans, so I w...