HALIFAX -- A high school basketball team in Nova Scotia has pulled off a perfect season – for the third straight year.
The Dartmouth High Spartans girls basketball team capped off an undefeated season on Tuesday night, winning the Capital Region banner with a 71-51 win over the Citadel High Phoenix.
“We were slow to start, I don’t think we scored until there were like four minutes left in the first quarter, we missed our first 11 shots which is not like us,” said Spartans head coach Marika Williams. “It took us longer than normal, but once we got into the flow of it, it was good.”
League MVP Sami Russell had a game high 19 points, Denezz Beals had 18 and Paris Melanson added 15 to lead the Spartans.
“It was definitely a feeling that we’ve kind of felt before, but it was so much different this year, knowing that it was our last game, and it was our last chance to play in this gym, so it was really great to experience that with my whole team,” says Melanson.
It was the third consecutive regional championship for the Spartans, but even more impressively, their third consecutive season without losing a single game, as their win streak improved to 74 consecutive wins.
“We’ve gone 74 wins and zero losses, that’s really, really wild,” says Williams.
For four Spartans seniors Russell, Beals, Melanson and Keanna Davies, they can boast the accomplishment of going undefeated their entire high school career, with a record of 74 wins and zero losses.
“We had joked about it, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we went undefeated’, but it didn’t actually click in that we were going undefeated until the last game of our grade 10 year. To be able to continue that on for the third year, it’s just crazy. It wasn’t anything we actually expected and to be able to do it is a crazy feeling,” says Melanson.
“We won those first 30 games, and after that it was, ‘well we could go undefeated for this season, and for our high school careers’, and it happened,” says Williams. “Game after game it was like ‘wooh, one more win’, and then it became 30 wins, 40 wins, 70, and then 74 last night."
Williams, who played five years of varsity basketball at Mount Saint Vincent University, took over the Spartans bench in 2018, and has led the team to the past two provincial championships.
Provincials were cancelled this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Melanson says the Spartans were just happy to get the chance to play out their season.
“When we didn’t even know if we’d get the chance to play, we were just being competitive with each other in practice knowing we had the opportunity to be in the gym when so many other provinces didn’t,” says Melanson.
Williams says she’s proud of her entire team, but will always share a special bond with the four seniors who have been part of the 74-0 run.
“We first got here together and we were very young, all of us, and we didn’t know what to expect. I’ve enjoyed watching them grow as both basketball players and humans,” says Williams.
And they may not be the only basketball team from Dartmouth High to win a championship this week.
The Spartans boys basketball team will play for the Capital Region basketball championship on Wednesday night, as they take on the Halifax Grammar School.
