The plan is to have a coffee with Roy Rana, the head coach of the Ryerson Rams, on the eve of what promises to be a pivotal season for the downtown Toronto school and maybe for CIS basketball.
He picks the place and directs me to a coffee shop in the not-quite gentrified Bloor-Lansdowne neighbourhood where he was born, raised and lives.
It’s named simply — “Home.”
Intentional or not, it’s perfect. Personally and professionally home is a place Rana has never left, and in Toronto university basketball terms, is striving to redefine.
His goal from the moment he was hired at Ryerson five years ago straight from the sidelines of gritty Eastern Commerce High School was to craft a program that reflected the school and its place in the urban reaches of the city where Rana grew up, taught, coached and is now raising his kids.
“I wanted to rebrand our program in Toronto,” he says. “I wanted to make our program sexy so kids would want to come and play here, and kids who were from here would want to stay.”
“I wanted to do something different.”
Remarkably, he’s accomplished just that at a school that until recently had no elite athletic tradition of consequence in the space of just six seasons.
A decade ago the Rams went 1-28 against CIS competition and were 38-115 in the five years before Rana arrived in August 2009. The first season was one of transition for Rana and the program. He says he needed to improve technically to compete in the ultra-competitive OUA East and it took some time for him to recruit and implement what is described as a culture of accountability and humility.
“They didn’t really understand the process of being excellent, and how hard it is, and how much you have to juggle and how much you have to sacrifice,” he says. “And it took some time to bring in some kids who could become part of that culture.”
The time has arrived. The Rams are undefeated (8-0) against Canadian competition so far this year and 87-33 since 2010-11.
On Wednesday night Rana will lead his No.3-ranked club — a high-water mark for the Rams — into their home opener at the glistening Mattamy Athletic Centre, former site of Maple Leaf Gardens and the launching point for Ryerson’s national emergence on a number of athletic fronts.
It’s the start of what he hopes will be a defining season.
On Thursday Ryerson is hosting a kick-off event at Mattamy — NBA Hall of Famer Bill Walton is the featured guest — for the ArcelorMittal Dofasco CIS Final 8 tournament which will be hosted by Ryerson from March 12-15.
As hosts Rana’s Rams are guaranteed to be in it, but his primary goal is to win it. Secondarily the hope is to use this season and the championship finale as a platform to engage Canada’s basketball hotbed with the university game.
The Toronto basketball scene has never been hotter. The Raptors are celebrating their 20th anniversary season with what could be the best team in franchise history and Toronto-area players are making an impact in the NBA and NCAA Division I levels in record numbers.
Which makes it all the more incongruous that a Toronto-area university has never won a CIS basketball championship and that a Toronto-area school has never hosted the national championship.
That the Rams are even in the conversation – and Rana allows that overcoming 10-time national champion Carleton and defending OUA champions Ottawa, currently the Everest and K2 of Canadian university basketball, will be no small feat– is a triumph in itself.
Toronto and basketball were synonymous to him and in the circles he lived and worked. He can still rhyme off names of local hoops stars from the 1980s and ’90s, a time many identify as the golden age for high school basketball — before the top names headed south for high school as a routine — and when thousands would pack the gyms at Jarvis Collegiate for tournaments and all-star games and the city championships. During his high school teaching and coaching career he always worked in the areas of the city that produced so much of the talent that has helped put the city’s basketball scene on the map. During his years with the Canadian under-16 and under-18 national teams he’s coached the best players the city has produced, from Andrew Wiggins to Anthony Bennett to Tyler Ennis.
But Toronto and CIS basketball? In his mind there was a disconnect.
“I almost felt like CIS basketball was a foreign institution to Toronto high school basketball,” said Rana, who helped 40 kids earn chances to play NCAA basketball in his nine years at Eastern, to go along with four provincial championships. “There’s the NCAA, there’s [long-time Canadian college power] Humber and then there’s the CIS, and the CIS is for the kid who went to Lawrence Park.
“I didn’t think at the time we had a program that was reflective of inner city Toronto basketball,” he said. “It was interesting when I first brought in my recruiting classes, many of them were visible minorities and the question was ‘can you keep these kids eligible’ – there was an assumption that there wasn’t really strong academic kids from inner city communities. I’d been in those communities so long I really felt we could build something with kids from there.”
It was that ambition that made Rana the perfect man for the job when Ryerson athletic director Ivan Joseph began looking for someone who could make basketball his school’s marquee sport.
That Rana, who is of Indian descent, wanted to build a program that looked like Toronto basketball was even better for Joseph, a son of Guyanese immigrants who first settled at Jane and Finch and who used soccer to launch his career in sports administration, first in the U.S. and since 2008 at Ryerson where he spearheaded a plan to make Ryerson a destination for elite athletes with a marquee basketball program his first goal.
“To be blunt, I was surprised to see how homogenous CIS and OUA sports were across the board,” said Joseph. “It was surprising how lily-white our teams were, and not just at our school. So I wanted programs that reflected the population that attends our university.”
To build local credibility Rana hired well-known Toronto basketball names like Colin Charles and Steve Morrison as assistant coaches. He leaned on his reputation in local high school circles for recruiting – nine of the 16 players on his roster are from the GTA – and he replicated the same, hard-nosed, up-tempo, wasps-around-a-hive approach on the floor that he’d perfected at Eastern.
And he sold his first class of freshman – a group in their final year this season – that they would have a chance to compete for a national championship as seniors on their home floor.
“That was something he talked about,” said fifth-year point guard Jahmal Jones, the three-time first-team OUA all-star from Mississauga. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t know anything about Ryerson in high school, but I trusted coach Rana and everything he said has pretty much happened so far. And he said we would have a chance to end our careers competing for a national championship at home, in front of our friends and family.”
For the Rams and Rana the path begins Wednesday night and if everything goes as planned it will end with a national championship in March, at home, where it all started.