Whiteboard in hand, Taffe Charles forces his way through his players to a red-cushioned chair. As he sits, the Carleton Ravens men’s basketball team crowds around him. Every eye is on him.
The energy on the court swells. There is less than a minute left in Friday’s game against the Ontario Tech Ridgebacks and everything is on the line.
“Listen to me. Listen to me,” Charles, head coach of the Ravens, pleads.
Feet away, the Ridgebacks are drawing up the play of a lifetime. Ontario Tech is 1-10 on the season, struggling to survive with an injury-plagued roster and overworked starters. But tonight, against the team ranked No. 1 in the nation, the Ridgebacks could do the impossible.
The timeout ends. The clock winds down—51 seconds, then 23, then 8.9. The Ravens take a four-point lead. With less than a second left, Ontario Tech’s Jayden Coke sinks a last-chance three-pointer. It isn’t enough.
The Ravens survive, winning the game 72-71. On Saturday, they battled again against the Guelph Gryphons—this time, with the game decided in the final two seconds. Carleton wins, 78-73.
Charles called Friday’s game upsetting. Guard Wazir Latiff said it was embarrassing. Then, on Tuesday, the Ravens fell to second place in the national rankings for the first time in nearly four years.
“I’m a little panicked because I know what it takes to win at the end and I don’t think we’re there yet,” Charles said Saturday. “We got another four or five weeks to figure it out.”
Carleton’s struggles stemmed from the underwhelming weekend from guard Aiden Warnholtz. The team leader in points per game, Warnholtz scored only five points on Friday and eight points on Saturday while committing a combined nine turnovers. His poor play exposed Carleton’s lack of depth, according to Charles.
“That’s very apparent. That’s not news,” Charles said in a post-game scrum.
Instead, Carleton’s other contributors haphazardly filled the void. Against Ontario Tech on Friday, guard Marjok Okado scored 19 points in 18 minutes, while guard Connor Vreeken scored a career-high 26 points against Guelph on Saturday.
It was barely enough. Against Ontario Tech, the Ravens were forced to the perimeter early, making seven three-pointers from 20 attempts in the first 16 minutes. They pulled ahead by 12 points with 2:42 left in the second quarter.
But the Ridgebacks made it a one-point game in the third quarter, then tied it 63-63 halfway through the fourth. They even led 68-66 with 1:15 left in the game.
“Every single person on our team tonight didn’t do the job they were supposed to do … It was obvious,” Latiff said, explaining that the Ravens underestimated Ontario Tech.
The last time the Ridgebacks played Carleton, the Ravens won by 53 points. Ontario Tech interim head coach Deluxshan Pathmanathan said the narrow loss was a “statement game” that shows how close the team is to “kicking that door open.”
While Guelph entered Saturday’s game after a week of rest—a scheduling quirk that Charles said “caught him off guard”—the Ravens managed to pull away with another win. Foul trouble marked an early end to Warnholtz’s night and limited Okado’s playing time, but Vreeken’s outburst put Carleton over the edge.
After the game, Charles reckoned with the state of the Ravens.
“They’re making mistakes on the fly. It’s very frustrating,” he said. “Development and winning are two different things, right? We’re trying to develop people and we’re trying to win at the same time and this is what’s going on. We have that intersection … and it’s just a hard process.”
Right now, the roster is in disrepair. The future isn’t much brighter. After landing softly in the new year with Ontario Tech, Guelph, Waterloo and Laurier, Carleton is now facing a gauntlet of three top-10 teams in five games, ending with the uOttawa Gee-Gees at Capital Hoops on Feb. 3.
Then, three weeks later, the playoffs, which Charles said will be “a bit of a disaster.”
“It will get better. After this year, we have a good recruiting year, we’ll get better,” Charles said. “If I take a step back … we’re doing pretty well. But again, the expectations are a little better than that.”
For the Carleton Ravens, the team that nearly always wins, next year is a long time to wait.
Featured image by Jayden R. Dill.
