After a blowout win in the first round and a heroic buzzer–beating victory in the semifinals, the Carleton Ravens won a hard-fought battle and the title of best team in the country, emerging as the 2009 Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) national champions.
“We’re back on top!” a beaming Aaron Doornekamp said after his team’s win against the University of British Columbia Thunderbirds March 15 at Scotiabank Place.
“You work hard and you try to win. There’s such a fine line between winning and losing and we were lucky and fortunate enough to win,” Ravens head coach Dave Smart said after the victory.
The game started badly for the Ravens with UBC winning the tip and scoring on their first three possessions while Carleton misfired. The Thunderbirds quickly built a 10-point lead that they held for most of the first quarter, making Carleton scramble to keep pace with them.
“We just weren’t playing the way we should,” Ravens fourth-year forward Kevin McCleery said.
The Ravens fought but their shots weren’t dropping. The one player whose shots were finding their target was the one player for the Ravens normally known for his defence, Rob Saunders.
Not normally a scorer, Saunders led the Ravens with 12 points in the first half.
“That was [UBC’s] plan,” Saunders said. “They were going to make me beat them. I’m out on the floor with four unbelievable players in Stu [Turnbull], Aaron [Doornekamp], Kevin [McCleery] and Mike [Kenny] and coaches pick their poison.”
Saunders made UBC pay for that game plan and kept the Ravens close long enough for the rest of his team to shake off their early jitters and play to their usual level.
“That’s why we’re the best team in the country, it’s a whole team effort, it’s not only a couple of guys,” Saunders said.
McCleery started the second half by hitting a pretty turnaround jumper, giving the Ravens the lead for the first time in the game.
Saunders followed by driving into a wall of UBC defenders and tossing up a prayer to draw a foul. Saunders hit the first of his shots, and Aaron Doornekamp grabbed the rebound off the second shot, wrestling it out of the arms of two UBC players, and then found McCleery under the basket.
McCleery missed but battled for the rebound, put back his own missed shot and gave the Ravens a four-point lead that energized the crowd.
Kevin McCleery said Smart’s half-time talk inspired the Ravens’ turnaround.
“We were playing scared on offence,” he said Smart told his players. “We weren’t relaxed and weren’t having any fun on offence. Then on defence we were playing relaxed when we should have been intense. I think we just had it backwards in the first half and in the second half we got it straightened out and it worked.”
The second half certainly produced a different and Carleton-friendly result.
Thunderbird star Chris Dyck, who led all scorers in the first half with 17 points, was held scoreless in the third quarter and only had four in the fourth, harassed by Saunders on defence.
For the second night in a row Smart’s starters were in foul trouble and so to end the game he ran a substitution pattern that saw three players off the bench for defence and then bringing back McCleery, Doornekamp and Kenny for offence.
With Carleton up by more than 10 and the game almost over, Kenny was flattened by Dyck on a drive to the net, and was slow to get up.
As he limped off the floor a fan yelled “You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
After the game Kenny said he agreed.
“It’s all numb now anyway,” Kenny said. “It’s crazy, to win in your hometown like this in front of your fans, families and friends is special.”
UBC stretched the game out by fouling every chance they had hoping that Carleton would miss, but they didn’t.
Finally, with mere seconds left in the game and Carleton up by 10 points, Turnbull, the leading scorer of the game and tournament MVP, dribbled out the clock sitting into a squat, still dribbling as the moment hit him.
Saunders jumped on him in celebration followed by the rest of the team and a sea of red as Carleton fans flooded down onto the floor to celebrate the team they cheer for and love, the 2009 CIS champion Carleton Ravens.