In the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) championship game between Carleton and Trinity Western University, a former Raven was on the Spartan bench, facing off against his old coach.
Spartan assistant coach Matt Boulton was the Carleton Ravens rookie of the year in 1996. Ravens bench boss Dave Smart was the assistant coach for the first couple years that Boulton donned the Raven jersey, and Smart took over in Boulton’s fourth year.
But Boulton had been playing for Smart and his nephew, assistant coach Rob Smart Jr., since he was 15 years old.
Boulton said Dave Smart and his coaching staff played a role in the Spartans nationals run because Boulton has carried over some of the philosophies he learned as a Raven.
“Dave and his staff can take a little bit of the credit for our silver medal too because a lot of the philosophies I learned at the school we’ve tried to implement at Trinity,” Boulton said after the championship match. “And as you can see, we’ve had a lot of success in that.”
But Boulton said he heard Smart isn’t as tough any more.
“I hear he has actually softened up a little bit, which is a good thing, because by the end of the season we couldn’t even jump anymore.”
He remembers the coaching staff at Carleton bringing a lot of intensity and knowledge to the dressing room.
“When you graduated Carleton in those days, you got a degree in basketball and whatever your chosen field of study was,” Boulton said.
The Spartans are still in the early stages of developing its men’s basketball program — they joined the CIS in 1999 and this was their first-ever nationals appearance. Boulton said he sees a lot of similarities between where the Spartans are at now and where the Ravens were when he played for them.
“We had a really good group of older players that really sort of shed some light on our younger players,” he said. “It was a difficult couple of years for us.”
“This year we really tightened the circle and the fifth years really stepped up and made things accountable and that was a really huge thing for us at Carleton as well.”
Boulton said he doesn’t think anyone at Carleton would disagree that basketball culture is a driving force behind getting to nationals every year.
“That’s why these young guys can just come in and pick up from where the teams before them left off because they just won’t accept anything else,” Boulton said. “I mean you either buy in or you’re out. And we’ve sort of started to apply that philosophy here and it’s been paying off.”
Although Boulton admits the team “was awful” when he played at Carleton, he believes they might have “laid a little bit of the blood and the foundation that kind of started the culture there.”
His favourite memory as a Raven was beating the cross-town University of Ottawa Gee-Gees in the 1996 Gorilla game — the former version of the Capital Hoops Classic.
“Lighting up Ottawa U for eight threes was a pretty good game for me in my rookie year,” Boulton said. “That same game we pulled out a win against Ottawa and I think we only won five games that year, so that was encouraging.”