Basketball: Near-perfect season for a team born from nothing

Girls’ Midget basketball team from Howard S. Billings High School is experiencing a triumphant return after three years’ absence. The Billings players dominated their league with a record of 10 wins and only two defeats. Nothing indicated the team would be in store for such success, since the girls had never played together before last September. Their secret?  The family spirit, according to coach Adrian Colquhoun. ‘’I teach them to always be together,’’ he explained. ‘’If one of them has a problem, it’s the whole team that has the problem. We must help each other and work together to find a solution.’’ This solidarity has been felt since the creation of the Blazers’ 2019-2020 vintage squad. It was the father of one of the players who approached Colquhoun to ask him to resuscitate girls’ basketball in order to enable his own daughter to continue playing her favourite sport. The coach accepted with pleasure, with the endorsemernt of school management, but financial problems remained. The team had to pay $1,000 for its season, an amount the coach did not want to make the girls pay. So Billings Alumni Foundation agreed to defray the costs. Colquhoun also enlisted the aid of assistants Tom Muirhead and Kaylie Stacey to help coach the girls. ‘’To try to economize, we did car-pooling in order to avoid having to pay for a minibus,’’ explained Colquhoun, who provides his basketball time free of charge. ‘‘For me, my pay is to see the smiles on the faces of the youngsters,’’ he said. Having finished in first place during the regular season, the Blazers automatically clinched a berth in the finals on February 25. (Translation Dan Rosenburg)