Not far from the heart of the Toronto Metropolitan University campus, inside the gleaming yellow and blue Mattamy Athletic Centre gymnasium, the unthinkable happened.
On Jan. 21, the Carleton Ravens men’s basketball team collapsed against the TMU Bold, blowing an 18-point lead and losing 86-80. But what made it so extraordinary was that it came just one night after another Ravens’ loss—a 56-54 defeat at the hands of the University of Toronto Varsity Blues.
The back-to-back defeats marked only the second time Carleton lost back-to-back games in the last 20 years. It was a new low in an uneven season, but also an inflection point.
Following that weekend, the Ravens rattled off nine straight wins to climb their way back up the Ontario University Athletics (OUA) standings and all the way to the conference final.
Now, even after losing in the OUA final to the uOttawa Gee-Gees on Saturday, the Ravens are days away from heading back to the U Sports national championship in Halifax from March 10 to 12.
So how did the Ravens, the winners of the last three national championships, rescue a season on the brink and find themselves three wins away from a fourth? It begins with urgency.
“As a coach, you try to formulate a sense of urgency. That’s our job—it’s urgent, urgent, urgent,” Carleton head coach Taffe Charles said three weeks after the Toronto weekend.
But that urgency wasn’t felt by the team leading up to the games against Toronto and TMU.
The weekend before, the Ravens inched past the Ontario Tech Ridgebacks with a one-point win, then did the same against the Guelph Gryphons in a five-point win. At the time, Ontario Tech was 1-10 and Guelph was 3-7.
The following Tuesday, right before travelling to Toronto, the Ravens dropped to second in the nation for the first time in nearly four years.
“Those [games] were wake-up calls, but apparently it wasn’t enough for us to have a mentality switch,” Ravens forward Reginald Jean Seraphin said on Feb. 10. “But those two losses, it really showed us—like those are unranked teams, you know? … We’re trying to win nationals. If we keep going like this, it’s done.”
That’s the realization the Ravens had. The team could no longer afford to lose without it threatening their path to another national championship.
“We all really had a big wakeup call,” Seraphin said. “We realized how important every game is from now on.”
Another factor at play was the performance of star guard Aiden Warnholtz. After putting up 12 points or more in all but one of the Ravens’ first 11 regular season games, he missed that mark in four straight games, including both the games in Toronto.
Charles said on Jan. 27 that the team hadn’t supported Warnholtz well enough. Warnholtz had tried to put the “game on his shoulders” but ended up performing worse.
“My shot wasn’t exactly falling, so I was trying to force some things that maybe were shots that were less likely to go in for me anyway, because I felt like I was trying to score to help my team out,” Warnholtz said a week after the Toronto weekend.
So Warnholtz went through film with Charles, digging into his struggles and making sure he took the shots he wanted to take.
The result was resoundingly positive for both Warnholtz and the Ravens. Up against the nationally-ranked Queen’s Gaels—one of the teams that beat the Ravens earlier in the season—in the first game after the Toronto trip, Carleton emerged with a comfortable 103-89 win. Warnholtz scored 28 points.
The Ravens kept rolling. The next night, they beat Ontario Tech by 13 points and Warnholtz scored 36 points, a regular season career high.
“Those losses kind of reset us a little bit,” Warnholtz said after the Capital Hoops game against uOttawa, which Carleton also won. “We can’t just win if we’re not gonna play well, we’re not gonna practice well.”
Reflecting on the Toronto weekend after clinching a berth at the national championship, Charles said it gave the team a new focus.
“That was a bit of, not a warning sign, but we knew we had no more room for error,” Charles said. “We had to start winning games. We had to beat Ottawa twice. We had to beat Queen’s. We had to beat Laurier … We could not afford to take any more steps back.”
Now, the Ravens are three wins away from a 17th national championship. The national quarterfinal will be Friday at 11 a.m. ET against the UQAM Citadins.
“We went through a lot of adversity,” Charles said. “It wasn’t perfect. We made a lot of mistakes. We’re a flawed team like everyone else, but at the end of the day, when it really mattered, we got things done … I’m super proud of these guys, each and every one of them.”
Featured image provided by Emily Simonetta/TMU Bold.
