I’ve got my work cut out for me.” Chris Fischer flops down on a courtside bench and looks out across the hardwood of this school gym in Collingwood, Ont. It’s a Monday in mid-October and the head coach of the Pretty River Academy senior boys basketball team has just run his club through an early season practice—60 minutes of more than a few passes to nobody and jump shots that can only be described as opposite-of-textbook. It looks like mid-season form isn’t likely to arrive until sometime in 2014. For some of these kids, that’s being generous. Among Fischer’s new recruits is a six-foot-two Grade 11 student named Declan Lune. He has asthma and he’s never played organized basketball in his life. Lune is standing on the sidelines by the water fountain, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “I don’t think he likes the sport,” Fischer says, “but we need the bodies.”
That’s the inescapable challenge at Pretty River, a K–12 private school in ski country. High school enrolment this year is 25 (10 boys and 15 girls, down from 21 of each last year). This is a school where even putting a team on the floor is a major victory. It’s also a school that is eight months removed from one of the most amazing championship seasons since tiny Milan High School in Indiana won the 1954 state title, inspiring the classic movie Hoosiers. This is the home of a ragtag squad that last year beat teams from schools 50 times Pretty River’s size. Teams that, according to forward Robin Matchett, “were supposed to completely destroy us.” And they pulled it off despite the fact that some of the players admit they “suck” at basketball.
Just like that small-town Indiana team they evoke, Pretty River’s magical season didn’t start with tryouts. In fact, when Fischer called the year’s first on-court practice in November 2011, his main hope was that he’d have enough players to fill out the bench beyond the starting five. With only 21 high-school-aged boys to choose from, every male was recruited, regardless of height, age, or, for that matter, whether they’d ever picked up a basketball. Fifteen-year-old Walker Scarrow, last year’s “motivator and water boy,” says they didn’t have much choice. “You’re breathing, you’re on the team. You have no hand-eye coordination? That’s fine.”
Twelve kids showed up at the first practice, including a kid with asthma so bad he couldn’t play in games, a competitive skier who missed most of the season, and an exchange student named Tassilo Schmidt who moved back to Germany halfway through the year. For most games, the roster was nine players deep. “We should have kept Tassilo hostage,” says Evan Kotler, the Predator’s 15-year-old backup forward. “We needed all the help we could get.”
Opposing teams often laughed when the Predators took the court. Having the word Pretty in the team name didn’t help matters—not even being the “Predators” makes up for that. But a much bigger problem was the inability of a few players to find the basket during warm-ups. “I’d miss routine layups,” says Kotler. “I wasn’t anything too hot out there.”
And the starting five didn’t exactly inspire fear, either. Grade 10 student Devon Thomson was “short, stocky and kind of slow,” if you ask his older brother, Cole, the team’s “maybe five-foot-eleven” point guard and co-captain, who is equally harsh in describing his own look as “not at all like a good basketball player.” Matchett had two years of basketball experience. Connor Gulley was a transfer student who became the team’s inside guy by default (he’s six-foot-three). And soft-spoken guard Sam Hirst is the type of kid, his teammates say, who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
All of that is not to say, however, that the Predators were devoid of weapons. Hirst and Cole were rep-calibre and had played together since they were little. Hirst is six-foot-three, he’s almost automatic from anywhere out to two feet beyond the arc and he can guard positions one through five on the other end. Cole has a great handle on the ball and mastered the floater to avoid getting his shot blocked in the paint. Gulley is a big body who’d fight for every rebound and can either score the easy basket or dish the ball to an open man. Matchett was new to the game, but he’s six feet, quick and an asset on defence. And Devon may have been slow and short (Cole kindly points out that his brother grew a lot this summer), but the kid is unbelievable from behind the three-point line. “Nobody would realize these things until we were beating them,” says Hirst, who’s the son of Pretty River’s energetic principal and co-founder, Roberta. (The Hirsts are a basketball family—they even have a dog named Hoops.)
In their second game of the season, the Predators played the top team in the region: Orillia’s Twin Lakes Secondary, a double-A school with 830 students, including four guys who played on the same rep team as Cole. Pretty River lost 47–39. But it was, perhaps, one of the most promising losses in high school basketball history. Cole’s rep teammates couldn’t believe they had to battle for the win. “They figured we were going to lose by 30,” he says. And the signs this team was a legitimate threat kept coming. In a tournament in November, the Predators played 2,500-student strong Sir Frederick Banting S.S. from London, Ont., and won by nine. Later that day, they took down Banting Memorial School from Alliston, Ont.—a school of 1,500—with a decisive 12-point win. Then, in January, the Predators won their first tournament, an eight-team round robin. “We whittled down bigger teams,” says Devon. “We outlasted them.”
It was all part of Fischer’s master plan. The 41-year-old who stands six-foot-six was a first-team Ontario University Athletics all-star at Laurentian before he got into teaching. Fisch, as he’s known among his players, recognized early on that there was an outside chance that Hirst and Cole—both seniors—could lead this team to something special. “This is the year we can make an impact,” he told them at the beginning of the season. But beyond the starting five, Fisch knew the talent pool was thin. He needed his starters to play the full 40 minutes. So to get them in game shape, he introduced the “mountain fun run” up and down a local ski hill. (“It wasn’t fun,” says Hirst.) Along with practice every day, the team did a minimum 30 minutes of dryland training, whether it was leapfrogging each other, doing push-ups, or racing up Blue Mountain. In the first dryland session of the season, backup centre Hayden Westgate threw up. He blamed it on too many slices of pizza, but he didn’t show up to practice the next day. “Fisch still likes to brag about that,” says Matchett, grinning. “It was brutal,” adds Devon. “But that’s why we won so many games in the fourth quarter. We were still in the game, physically and mentally.”
As the Predators started picking up wins, the belief grew. You’d find the entire team playing in the gym over lunch hour in their school-uniform white dress shirts and navy blue pants. On weekends, Cole and Hirst asked Fischer to meet them at school to work on shooting. That’s when Cole perfected his floater, racing down the court over and over, then pulling up to loft the ball over the outstretched arms of his coach, who has seven inches on him. Hirst chucked threes until they dropped like rain, even with Cole and Fischer in his face. During the team’s 23-8 regular season run, Hirst led the Predators with 22 points and 10 rebounds a game. Cole was second with 19 and four, stats he managed while being the school’s top student academically. “They lived the sport,” says Nick Andersen, the team’s sixth man, who prefers snowboarding and hockey to the hardcourt. “You have to admire that.”
It was this commitment that helped the Predators sail through the Georgian Bay Secondary Schools Association regional championship in February to qualify for provincials. Pretty River had never finished better than eighth at the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) single-A championship, but when the rankings came out in March, the Predators were No. 3—the highest in school history. “We were pretty confident at that point,” says Cole. “Maybe even overconfident. We started to really believe we could do this.”
On March 5, nine Predators piled into parents’ minivans and SUVs and made the three-and-a-half-hour drive south to Ridley College in St. Catharines, Ont. But the run almost ended just as it was getting started. In the opener that afternoon against Toronto’s ninth-seeded St. Patrick Patriots, Pretty River clawed back from a four-point deficit in the final frame. They handled Kapuskasing District H.S. easily the next morning, but faced another scare that night against sixth-seeded London District Christian S.S., a game they trailed by six with 3:29 to go. “I legitimately thought the dream was over,” says Cole. Adds Devon, “I felt so sick, I thought we were going to lose.” But Hirst nailed two straight jumpers and secured six of Pretty River’s final 11 points in a 62–58 win.
The semifinal game was billed by tournament organizers as a David vs. Goliath matchup—Pretty River against second-seeded Villanova College from King City, a team of six-plus footers. The Predators trailed by nine at halftime, but cut the deficit to a single point with a minute to go. Then Cole dribbled up the court, made like he was driving for the basket, pulled up and floated a jumper—the one he’d worked on weekend after weekend—just out of the reach of a Villanova defender. It gave the Predators their first lead of the game, and they held on for a 33–32 win. Kotler, Scarrow, Andersen, Westgate and assistant coaches Katie Holmes and Rob Lidbetter couldn’t speak after that game thanks to an hour of yelling from the bench.
The Predators had seven hours to rest their voices and their legs before that night’s final against the fifth-ranked Ridley College Tigers, the host school. Looking back, Cole wishes he’d taken a nap in between games. Instead, he used the extra time to catch up on homework.
Every player on the team gets wide-eyed when talking about the crowd that night. Two Tiger mascots wearing Ridley jerseys paced the sidelines. (Kotler jokes the Predators don’t have a mascot because that would mean sacrificing a big body to fill out the suit.) More than 400 screaming fans packed the bleachers. The “Let’s go Tigers!” chants were deafening. A kid dressed in orange did star-jumps behind the Tigers’ basket to distract the Predators, whose 40-strong fan base of friends and family carved out a small part of the grandstand in their Pretty River blue. Back home, the entire school was watching the game from the cafeteria. Tipoff was 8 p.m. on a school night, but even the kindergarteners were there. Nobody was going to miss this.
And, at the outset, they weren’t disappointed. The Tigers got into some early foul trouble and the Predators hit 12 of 14 free throws, taking a 32–21 lead into halftime. “The best part was hitting shots and watching the crowd go quiet,” says Devon, smiling, “seeing their faces change.” But a different Tigers team emerged from the locker room for the second half. Ridley used a triangle-and-two defence and focused on shutting down Hirst and Cole, limiting the Predators to two points in the third quarter. In the fourth, the Tigers took the lead. “The gym went to a whole other decibel level,” Cole says. The sound emerging from the Predators bench, meanwhile, was “like a bunch of 80-year-old chain smokers,” says Kotler. “Our voices were gone.”
With 7.5 seconds left on the clock, Ridley College was up 43–41 and heading to the foul line with a chance to put the game out of reach. They hit the first shot to go up by three points. “I was certain he was going to hit the second one,” says Cole. But he didn’t. Devon got the rebound and passed it to the guy who’d been practising his threes all season for moments like this. Hirst sprinted up the court with the ball, a mob of three Tigers on him. At school back home, his mother, Roberta, stared at the floor—she couldn’t watch. The seconds ticked down. Three. Two. Hirst pulled up two steps in front of the three-point line, stepped through the defenders, absorbed his arms into his body and heaved the shot up with a second to spare. The whole bench was on their feet, mouths open, watching the ball. “It was slow motion,” says Scarrow. At the buzzer, it rattled in. The Predators bench and three fans in blue wigs and Pretty River jerseys rushed onto the court. About 10 minutes later—after a sloppy overtime frame Pretty River took by a score of 3–1—the Predators emptied onto the court again; this time, as provincial champions.
Half court turned into a mosh pit. Cole and Hirst found Fischer and the three hugged. Celebrations with the trophy went on for more than an hour, none of them noticing when the stream of more than 400 Tigers fans left the gym. “I felt unstoppable,” says Matchett. At 11 p.m. the concierge came in to tell the Predators he had to shut the gym down. They were still celebrating on the court when the lights went out. “We didn’t want the moment to end,” says Hirst. “I loved the entire team. I loved that we did it all together.”
It was 3 a.m. by the time Cole and Devon got home. Devon slept in the next day but Cole had to be at school for 9 a.m. He had science lab. On the way in, he ran into his Grade 8 art teacher, who told him Pretty River’s win ranked No. 3 in his all-time greatest sports moments, behind only Sidney Crosby’s golden goal in Vancouver and Michael Jordan’s game-winner against Utah in 1998. “That gives you an idea how big this was for our school,” Cole says.
That morning, Fischer walked into school behind Westgate, who didn’t play during the final because of a sprained ankle. “That’s him!” a couple kindergarten kids screamed, and ran up to the backup big for high-fives. The whole team wore their medals to school. Fisch spent the day responding to congratulatory phone calls and emails from fellow coaches who called it the best high school game they’d ever seen.
Eight months have passed since that win, and still the school boasts about it on the welcome sign. The OFSAA banners hang in the foyer, the first provincial win for this school in its 14-year existence. Players say the banners are never coming down. Finding members of the basketball team among the students in the hall isn’t difficult—they’re the guys wearing gargantuan blue and silver OFSAA championship rings, sparkly showpieces that dominate their right hands. “I haven’t taken it off,” says Scarrow. He worked at a mini-putt course this past summer and loved answering customers’ questions about how he earned that ring. Teammates swear he even wears it to bed.
That three-point buzzer beater Hirst hit to send the game to overtime is legendary at Pretty River Academy, where it’s known as “The Shot.” Fischer still gushes when he talks about it. “We’d worked on that shot for hours, that exact spot,” he says. “It was too good to be true, like it was written out, the way it was supposed to be.” Sixth-man Andersen’s younger brother, Elias—he was at every game last year if it didn’t conflict with his own basketball games—says every kid at school knows about The Shot. “Oh, except the kindergartens,” the 12-year-old says, “because they’re new.”
The author of The Shot is no longer a Predator. Hirst is at Laurentian, where he’s studying sports administration and, just like Fisch did, plays varsity basketball, coached by a former teammate of Fischer’s. When Hirst arrived at the school in Sudbury, Ont., he walked into his dorm room to meet his roommate, a kid from Niagara Falls. “Oh, I know who you are,” he said to Hirst. “You’re the guy that hit that shot against Ridley College.” Cole, meanwhile, is a student at Western, where he’s taking business and playing basketball every day. The varsity team coaches had a look at him this fall and told him to work on his speed. He’ll try out again next year.
Back at Pretty River, the team is preparing to defend its title. The Predators have not only lost their stars, but since enrolment is down, their eight players on the basketball team represent 80 percent of Pretty River’s male high school population. Fisch is adding the other two guys in high school to the roster “just in case.” The coach chuckles when asked about the chance of a repeat. “I have a bunch of boys who have trouble catching the ball,” he says, sitting in his small office just off the gym, a blown-up picture of his championship team taped on the wall behind him. “We’re back to fundamentals, but the good thing is these guys are really keen and excited to play.”
Scarrow, Kotler and Andersen are now starters. Since he’s six-foot-three, Scarrow is the team’s main post presence, and with a week of basketball camp under his belt, he’s hoping he can up his production from 1.8 points per game (though he prefers to round up to two). Kotler has gone from “sucking” to “half-decent”—he practised a lot this summer after Fisch told him “We’re gonna have no one next year.” Andersen has big shoes to fill as a starter, but he nods when asked if he thinks he’s up to the challenge. Cole and Matchett are the Nos. 1 and 2 offensive options this season, both ready to take over the starring roles. Taking over the bench are Lune, who describes his skill as “close to no skill at all,” Matt Velanoff, who’s “ready to learn,” and five-foot-six Grade 9 student Jack Christensen, who laughs when he pictures playing against guys who are six-foot-six and have moustaches. Christensen calls basketball practice rough but is excited for the challenge of games. “We gotta keep that OFSAA championship,” he says.
The Predators have a season-opening tournament Nov. 23. Scarrow is nervous about his new role as a starter, and even though he knows this season is going to be tougher, he’s convinced they have a shot at the repeat. So is every kid on this team. Take one look at the Pretty River Predators and it seems, well, completely impossible.
Just like it did last year.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.