Back:

Middle: George Chapman, Don Cousins, Ray Pletcher.

Front: Gordon Eddy, Jack Newstead, Lorne Barnes, Bob Ramsay, Howard Peterson, Terry Julian – coach.

The 1953 Burnaby South Rebels boys’ basketball team was the first team from Burnaby to win the B.C. inter-high school basketball tournament. 

The Rebels won the George Sparling trophy with a heart-stopping 53-51 victory over defending three-time champion Duke of Connaught. Don Steen and Bob Ramsay are the only two players in tournament history to share the honour as most valuable player in the provincial tournament.

In the final minute of the championship game, Jack Newstead nailed two free throws to knot the contest at 51-51. Ramsay then intercepted a long, in-bounds pass with 20 seconds left to play and raced down the court before launching the game-winning bucket with a long, one-handed shot that put South into the record books.

Steen, who went on to a successful track and field coaching career that led to him becoming an honoured member of the Burnaby Sports Hall of Fame (2001), had a team-high 19 points in the final game and set a tournament scoring record with 83 total points.

David Lough has been a bench boss for more junior A lacrosse teams in consecutive Minto Cup tournaments than any other coach in the history of box lacrosse. Lough guided the Burnaby Lakers to 12 Minto Cup championships (1996 to 2007), winning five times in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004 and ’05.

In 13 seasons as a co-coach of the junior A Lakers, Lough’s only losing season was the first season in 1995. During his tenure, Lough fashioned a career league record of 248 wins and just 36 losses, winning 10 regular season titles from 1996 to 2002, and again in 2004 and 2006 through ’07.

In the playoffs, the Lakers were almost unbeatable, taking 12 straight B.C. titles, winning 82 times and losing just 15. In 12 consecutive appearances at the Minto, under Lough, Burnaby featured in 10 final title series or games in a row.

The Burnaby emergency department physician’s overall career coaching record with the junior A Lakers was 365 wins and 81 losses. The 12 Lakers dynasty championships teams that played in the Minto Cup were inducted into the Burnaby Sports Hall of Fame in 2004.

Lough’s success with the Lakers also earned him induction in the coaching category of the Huntsville (Ont.) Sports Hall of Fame where he played hockey, basketball and lacrosse, including winning the Minto Cup with the 1963 Oshawa Green Gaels.

Photo: Mario Bartel

Dave Lough, right, talks strategy with co-coach Paul Dal Monte during a Burnaby Jr. Lakers practice.

Brit Townsend has coached the Simon Fraser University women’s team to five National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics cross-country and women’s indoor track and field national championships and she has won seven Great Northwest Athletic Conference and two NCAA Division II West Region Coach of the Year awards while her teams have earned four conference titles and two regional banners.

Townsend was named the NAIA cross-country coach of the year in all five of those winning seasons from 2003 to 2007. An 800-metre outdoor NAIA champion in 1986, Townsend produced five individual national cross-country champions and two five-time indoor champions – Ruky Abdulai and Julia Howard.

She was also coach of the year in 2005, when the Burnaby Mountain institution won the NAIA outdoor track and field championships. Townsend coached Abdulai — an honoured member of the Burnaby Sports Hall of Fame (2017) — to 10 individual outdoor titles during her university career. That same year her women’s cross-country won the five star Champions of Character award.

Prior to her coaching career, Townsend starred for SFU in the 1980s winning the NAIA 800 metres in 1986 setting an NAIA record that wasn’t broken until 2011 by one of her athletes, Helen Crofts. She represented Canada at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and competed for Canada at the Pan American and Commonwealth Games, the World Cup and world championships.

Townsend was inducted into the SFU Sports Hall of Fame in 2012. Here is a story written about Townsend by Canadian Running Magazine.

Walter Torry began setting five pins in the 1950s and didn’t stop. The long-time Burnaby resident was inducted into both the B.C. Tenpin Federation (BCTF) and American Bowling Congress halls of fame in 2000.

A player, certified coach and organizer of league teams, Torry helped create and later served on the board of the BCTF, including as its president from 1979 to 1991. He was also a director in the Canadian Tenpin Federation for 17 years. As the CTF chair, Torry was responsible for bringing the prairie provinces into the youth championships, creating the first true national championships.

He represented Canada as a coach in the first World Games, as well as being a rep on the rules committee.

Torry has worked on developing many teaching coaching levels. From 1976 to 1996, Torry taught the tenpin university coaching course which preceded the U.S. Olympic gold program. In 1980, Torry was named coach of the year by the Bowling Federation of Canada. Torry has also spent 38 years in the Greater Vancouver Tenpin Bowling Association.

Torry passed away in October 2010. He was 84.

Sohen Gill has done it all in lacrosse .

Raised in North Burnaby, Gill played lacrosse as a youngster and went on to help lead the Norburn junior team to the Minto Cup as the league scoring champion. He played seven seasons in the senior leagues before moving behind the bench as coach and general manager of junior and senior clubs in the 1970s and ’80s.

Gill also held a variety of administrative posts, including coach and GM of the Maple Ridge Burrards, assistant commissioner of B.C. masters lacrosse, chair of BCLA senior directorate and CLA box sector, member of Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame western player selection committee, Minto and Presidents Cup convenor, as well as others.

Gill had a four-year stint as commissioner of the Western Lacrosse Association beginning in 1987 and returned to the position in 2002 holding it until 2009 after which he was the assistant commissioner.

In addition to being an honoured member of the Burnaby Sports Hall of Fame, Gill has been inducted into the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame (2005) and the BC Sports Hall of Fame (2009).

The City of Burnaby honoured Gill by naming its new covered lacrosse/multi-sport box at Confederation Park, where he played as a youth and owned a home across the street from, after him in 2024.

Gill is a past winner of the CLA’s Lester B. Pearson award for dedication and the Sport B.C. Daryl Thompson Award for extraordinary contribution to sport.

He passed away in December 2019. He was 78.

Photo: Mario Bartel

Sohen Gill poses at the Confederation Park lacrosse box he grew up playing at.

THIS IS AN ARTICLE THAT APPEARED IN THE BURNABY NEWSLEADER PRIOR TO SOHEN GILL’S INDUCTION  INTO THE BC SPORTS HALL OF FAME.

By Grant Granger

NewsLeader

As a kid growing up in the 1940s, Sohen Gill would hang around Confederation Park. 

One day a man, who turned out to be Val Roach, asked him, “Hey did, do you want to play lacrosse?”

“Sure,” the tyke replied.

“Well, then show up on Saturday and we’ll have a stick for you.”

Gill got his stick and started playing, but he didn’t have any running shoes. He asked his mom for some but she said, “We can’t afford it.” The mother of seven also didn’t want him playing lacrosse because it was too violent.

But Gill played anyway. Then one Friday night Gill and his Norburn team played between periods of a senior game at the PNE Forum. Gill scored on a breakaway and a Vancouver Sun photographer captured him running down the floor in his street shoes with the picture running on the front page of the sports section.

His parents saw it and freaked out with embarrassment. The next day they whisked him up to Bob’s Sporting Goods and little Sohen had his running shoes.

It was the start of Gill’s hall of fame lacrosse life. Gill has scored a hall of fame hat trick. First of all, it was the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 2003 as a builder. Then he was inducted into the Burnaby Sports Hall of Fame in February. Next Wednesday at the new Vancouver Convention Centre, he will go into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame.

Over the decades, Gill has frequently looked at the plaques on the wall at the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame and he’s finding it difficult to comprehend he’ll be up there too. Or to comprehend he’s going in with the likes of baseball star Larry Walker, jockey Chris Loseth and Salmonbellies icon Paul Parnell. “Pretty scary,” he says.

Actually, he’s there for good reason.

As a player, Gill won the 1961 junior A scoring title as the Burnaby Norburns made it to the Minto Cup. Their coach, Bill Dickinson—a charter member of the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame—wanted to keep them together and applied to go senior A in 1962 even though the vast majority were still of junior age. They won just four games and disbanded a year later.

Gill played a year in Victoria before landing a job with the Vancouver Fire Department, which meant he couldn’t play, for insurance reasons, for at least a year. In 1965, Gill joined the Coquitlam Adanacs but was finding it tough to get time off work and with coach Gordie Gimple not giving him much playing time he didn’t feel it was worth it. So he quit and started playing Senior B instead.

From 1972 to 1986, Gill coached and managed many different teams in Burnaby and Coquitlam and then in 1987 began a four-year stint as Western Lacrosse Association commissioner before getting back into management again.

Along the way, he had his wife—he married the coach’s daughter Carol Dickinson—had daughters Tracey and Carey before son Chris, who now plays for the New Westminster Salmonbellies and the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League. Chris was born to play lacrosse. The year of his birth, 1972, the family bought a house across the street from a lacrosse box.

People say to Gill, “Chris got his talent from you.”

“No he didn’t,” replies Gill. “He got it from his mother’s side.”

The horse racing fanatic says, “I know breeding and he got it from her.”

On the job, Gill was a victim of a firefighter’s nightmare. It was Dec. 29, 1990 and Gill was up on the roof of a Vancouver restaurant trying to assess the damage when the roof disintegrated and he fell into the blaze below burning his hands and legs. He felt some water on his face and he scrambled toward it, and then dove out a window with the help of someone pulling. His burns were so bad it took him two-and-a-half years of rehabilitation.

But that didn’t stop Gill from coaching and managing teams.

The sport isn’t as big as it was when he was growing up. It bothers him to pick up the morning paper and have to go through seven pages of Vancouver Canucks before finding a lacrosse score buried in the back pages. “I don’t understand why Canada’s national summer sport is not getting any coverage. I do understand why, it’s dollar and cents. But it hurts me we don’t have a professional team in Vancouver.”

When the Vancouver Ravens played from 2002 to 2004 it helped drive up lacrosse registration, and Gill believes it will be back. “I know we’re getting a team again, it’s just a matter of when.”

Gill feels the calibre is better in the WLA than the NLL. The Mann Cup champs would “annihilate” the NLL champion. Many of the good players can’t play in the NLL because they have jobs, says Gill.

In 2002, he became WLA commissioner again. He’s now assistant commissioner to Ernie Truant, but still does most of the work while Truant takes care of suspensions to avoid any conflict of interest accusations for Gill. He is also is president of the B.C. Lacrosse Association, spending about three to four hours a day at the BCLA office in Burnaby.

The 68-year-old lives just across the street from Confederation Park, often working out at the recreation centre right beside the lacrosse box where it all started.

THIS LINK IS TO THE WRITEUP ON GILL DONE BY THE BC SPORTS HALL OF FAME

Lorne Davies was Simon Fraser University’s first athletic director and is credited with designing, implementing and overseeing Canada’s first financially supported awards program for scholar athletes. Davies was a pioneer in changing how Canadian post-secondary institutions operated in order to keep university athletes in Canada.

To make the scholarships possible, Davies spearheaded SFU’s admission to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics in the United States.

In addition to his administrative duties, Davies was head coach of SFU’s football team from 1965 to 1972. In the 1970 season, SFU was 8-0, the only undefeated season in the school’s football team’s history.

He established the first national sports training centres in Canada for soccer, wrestling and track and field. He also established the first women’s varsity softball program in Canada. As well, Davies was the first to offer women athletes top coaching, equipment and scholarships. He hired full-time coaches in all varsity sports and appointed and trained Canada’s first university sports information officer and marketing manager.

Davies was inducted into the SFU Hall of Fame in 1986, the BC Sports Hall of Fame in 2010, the Western Washington University Hall of Fame in 1995 and the BC Football Hall of Fame in 2011. Davies even has a Grey Cup ring, won in 1964 as an assistant coach with the BC Lions.

Davies sat on the Terry Fox Humanitarian Award board for 20 years and the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame for 30 years, as well as many other volunteer committees. Davies was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 2000. He was named administrator of the year in 1989 by the NAIA and awarded the Premiers award for contribution to sport in 1994.

Davies passed away in 2015 at the age of 84.

Heather Wilson was first capped for Canada’s national women’s rugby team against Wales at the 1994 World Cup.

Wilson, a back row forward, went on to represent her country 15 times, primarily at the No. 8 position.

The Burnaby firefighter played in two other World Cups for Canada, in 1998 and again in 2002. She captained the national team on two separate occasions.

Wilson-Banks played her club rugby for the Burnaby Lake Rugby Club for 12 seasons.

Barry Ihaksi is a Burnaby North high school grad who had numerous soccer and track and field accomplishments during his career.

He went on to win gold medals at the Canadian junior track and field championships and numerous other medals in athletics throughout Canada and the U.S in the early 1960s.

Ihaksi was also a gifted soccer player and played for the perennial B.C. and Canadian senior championship club, Columbus F.C. He had stints as well with Greenock Morton of the professional Scottish league and Apia Soccer Club in Sydney, Australia. 

Basketball B.C. Hall of Famer Bob Hieltjes is the second-best all-time player in Simon Fraser University history. Hieltjes captained the Clan men’s team for three seasons and was named an NAIA District 1 all-star three times.

In his university career from 1983 to 1987, Hieltjes garnered 2,364 points and averaged 19.7 points per game for the Clan, both third all-time. He is the program’s second all-time in free throws with 540 and is the Clan’s fifth all-time leading rebounder. In 1984,

Hieltjes helped B.C. win gold with an all-star performance at the Canadian under-21 basketball championships. Hieltjes went on to play two seasons as player/coach for the Northland Basketball Club in New Zealand, averaging 35 points and 12 rebounds per game. As an import pro play in Germany, Hieltjes helped Wolfenbuttei earn promotion to the first division, averaging 23 points a game.

The St. Thomas More grad was inducted into the BC Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008 and the SFU Sports Hall of Fame in 2012.

Ryan Banks represented Canada 36 times on the national men’s rugby squad.

The former Team Canada captain and No. 8, played for the national team at the men’s World Cup in 1999 and again in 2003, when he served as captain for Canada’s game against the New Zealand All-Blacks.

Banks played one season professionally for Bedford in England.

Banks, a Simon Fraser University grad, is a 14-year veteran of the Burnaby Lake Rugby Club. He has also helped out the local club as a coach.