Surrey’s Winner’s Circle All-Star Basketball Classic is another casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The event, played annually at Enver Creek Secondary during the first week of April, is a final chance for Surrey’s best senior ‘ballers to play together as high schoolers, in a pair of fun games featuring both boys and girls.
The night is also when boys scholarship winners are announced by organizers of January’s Surrey RCMP Classic tournament. Girls are given scholarships during the annual Surrey Fire Fighters Goodwill Classic.
Rick Inrig, a founder and organizer of the RCMP Classic, announced the tournament’s six scholarship winners ahead of the cancelled April 3 all-star game.
“This is unfortunate,” Inrig said. “We will make presentations at a later date.”
• RELATED STORY: Lord Tweedsmuir tops Tamanawis in all-cat fight for Surrey RCMP Classic title.
Lord Tweedsmuir’s Jaeden Reid is the 2020 winner of the Roger Pierlet Memorial Scholarship, Semiahmoo Secondary’s Hamza Saqib picked up the Chris Mohan Memorial Scholarship, Fleetwood Park senior Abishek Kanagasabay won the Safe Schools Scholarship for Overcoming Adversity, Sullivan Heights’ Gerardo Arguello earned the Chad Clifford of Drive Basketball Scholarship, and Surrey School District Scholarships went to Fleetwood Park’s Bhavrup Gosal and Tegbir Kainth of Tamanawis.
Reid, who won this year’s Classic with Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers, has the goal of becoming a teacher and coach.
“Basketball has had a large impact on my life,” he wrote in applying for the Roger Pierlet Memorial Scholarship, which remembers the first Surrey RCMP officer killed in the line of duty, in 1974. “(Basketball) has shaped the person I am by teaching me valuable life skills. It has also introduced me to friends and role models who have impacted my life.”
Semiahmoo’s Saqib plans to study sciences at UBC and then apply to the dentistry program. He won the Chris Mohan Memorial Scholarship, which remembers one of the two innocent victims in the “Surrey Six” murders. “Without basketball I wouldn’t be who I am today,” Saqib said. “It has impacted my life in a positive way.”
Fleetwood Park’s Gosal plans to become an engineer, Kanagasabay aims to become a medical professional, Sullivan Heights’ Arguello wants to get a diploma in sports science, and Tamanawis’ Kainth will pursue sciences at university.
The list of previous Classic scholarship winners is posted to surreybasketballclassic.info/scholarships.
Meantime, Inrig also shared the rosters for the all-star games that won’t be played.
The boys are Jackson Corneil (Tweedsmuir), Jaeden Reid (Tweedsmuir), Arbin Dhillon (Tamanawis), Tegbir Kainth (Tamanawis), Varris Janda (Tamanawis), Hamza Saqib (Semiahmoo), Comrie Engbers (Surrey Christian), David Liu (Surrey Christian), Vincent Ubaldo (Guildford Park), Eric Hernandez (Guildford Park), Marcellus Linnen (Frank Hurt), Adrian Brown (Frank Hurt), Sukhman Dhatt (L.A. Matheson), Gerardo Arguello (Sullivan Heights), Rohan Bains (Queen Elizabeth), Abishek Kanagasabay (Fleetwood Park), Bhavrup Gosal (Fleetwood Park), Harrison Hughes (Southridge), Brandt Muncey-Buckley (Southridge) and Ethan Tu (Elgin Park), with coaches Raj Bagry (Tweedsmuir) and Manny Dulay (Tamanawis).
• RELATED STORY, from January: Semiahmoo Totems top Tweedsmuir for Goodwill hoops title.
For the girls all-star game, the players are Veronica Phillips (Earl Marriott), Sydney Chapman (Earl Marriott), Maddie Guild (Salish), Anna Bodnar (Lord Tweedsmuir), India Aikins (Lord Tweedsmuir), Taya Suttill (Lord Tweedsmuir), Raya Atwal (Holy Cross), Samantha Ogbiewi (North Surrey), Sara Uppal (North Surrey), Anjenna Dhaliwal (Panorama Ridge), Arman Dulai (Panorama Ridge), Sophia Kramer (Sullivan Heights), Davida Hill (Pacific Academy), Jayda Anderson (Southridge), Rachan Grewal (Enver Creek), Emma Betts (Elgin Park), Sanya Purewal (Tamanawis) and Jenna Goeres (Fleetwood Park), with coaches Mike Mitro (Lord Tweedsmuir) and John Sowerby (Earl Marriott).
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