Surrey ruggers win provincial championship<\/p>\n
Published 10:00 pm Tuesday, June 2, 2026<\/p>\n
A Cloverdale high school captured a provincial rugby title May 30.<\/p>\n
The Lord Tweedsmuir rugby Panthers went 3-0 at the provincial championships in Abbotsford to take home the title in the Challenger Division. The squad dumped Heritage Woods 33-7 in their tourney opener. They downed Rutland 43-19 in Game 2. And they doubled Kelowna 20-10 to win the title game.<\/p>\n
The championship game against the Kelowna Owls was \u201celectric\u201d noted head coach Walter van Halst.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe won 20 to 10 but had a spectacular try by Jerin\u2019The Finnish Flash\u2019 Harinen called back on a forward pass, which wasn\u2019t forward,\u201d van Halst said two days after the big win. \u201cJake \u2018The Warrior\u2019 Johnson was our Man of the Match (in that game) and \u2026 Harinen was our tournament MVP.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Challenger Division is the Tier II provincial championship bracket. The top eight-ranked teams compete in Tier I with 9-through-16 competing in the Tier II field.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not the number one team in the entire province because that honour goes to Collingwood who defeated Robert Bateman in the (Tier I) division,\u201d van Halst explained. \u201cTherefore, you could consider us the ninth best senior boys team in all of B.C. High School Rugby.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added he\u2019s very proud of the \u201camazing athletes\u201d in Grade 12 who formed the core of the team\u2014and who also won a provincial championship in football this past Nov. 30.<\/p>\n
These players include the rugby team captain, Mathew Reid, whose dad, Bruce Reid, helps coach both football and rugby at Tweedy. It includes Harinen, tourney MVP\u2014a player van Halst said was \u201clikely the highest scoring player of all the athletes in the provincial championships.\u201d It includes \u201cpowerful\u201d lock forwards, Johnson and Wil \u201cThe Punisher\u201d Sheppard. And it includes forward pack leader Caine \u201cSuper\u201d Maggio, who will play in New Zealand this summer after having toured there this year during spring break.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis group of athletes achieved success as athletes because they entered Grade 8 in the fall of 2021, when sports were just coming out of COVID,\u201d noted van Halst. \u201cThey were hungry to get off their cell phones, get away from TikTok, and return to normal life\u2014including, and especially, involving playing every sport they could get their hands on.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said those Grade 8s, now Grade 12s, embodied the Lord Tweedsmuir credo that players should play multiple sports.<\/p>\n
\u201cReal athletes are multisport athletes, not just one-trick ponies,\u201d van Halst noted. \u201cIn other words, they rejected the sports hucksters who tried to monopolize their whole lives by making them play only one sport all year round.\u201d<\/p>\n
By their actions, he added, the student athletes proved that success in one sport should never be mutually exclusive of success in another sport, or even in multiple sports.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey symbolized the spirit of cooperation between athletes and coaches, which is necessary for any school to have a good sports program.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coach van Halst said the kids are the most-talented group of athletes he\u2019s ever coached and also the most grateful and most determined.<\/p>\n
He said coaching the boys was an \u201cabsolute honour,\u201d revealing the provincial championship victory was bittersweet for him as he was consumed with emotion when he heard the final whistle blow.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was filled with joy at their accomplishment and sadness at the thought that so many of them are leaving,\u201d van Halst explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that all of our graduating players continue to play the greatest sport in the world for many, many years to come.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Surrey ruggers win provincial championship Published 10:00 pm Tuesday, June 2, 2026 A Cloverdale high school captured a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":711748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,163792,87674],"class_list":["post-711747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-lower-mainland","tag-surrey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/711748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}