The third Bronze Baby in four years for Kate Hole was the best of the bunch with the Simon Fraser University Clan.
"It's hitting me a little harder than the other two did," Hole said Wednesday from the Burnaby campus. "It's not because of the team we played against or the way we won the tournament, it's strictly based on the fact that it's the last one so it's got all those extra emotions attached to it."
Her last hurrah in university basketball was Sunday's 77-56 win over the Windsor Lancers in the CIS final at McMaster University in Hamilton. Tears flooded the gym as time ticked down on her championship-laden career.
"Obviously you're trying really hard not to think about it and I had kind of hoped that I would maintain some level of composure when everything finished," said the St. Albert product of the SLAM program and the junior high Sir George Simpson Voyageurs.
"There was maybe 25 seconds left and I was on the bench gripping people's shorts, just shaking. As the clock goes down to four, three, two, one I'm bouncing around the sideline and I started bawling. I probably expelled half of my body weight in water. I was just crying so hard. I was not composed in the slightest. It was not that good."
A few days later Hole struggled, summing up her feelings.
"It's an interesting mix of emotions. I would like to say cloud nine but it's a thundercloud. It's like I'm just basking in it but at the same time there is an edge. I'm so happy and I'm just euphoric, but it feels like the climax right now and I know there is really nothing after it."
Off the court it recently dawned on her that life after basketball has started.
"It was my two-year anniversary with my boyfriend [Tom Pearce] a couple of days ago. He bought me a charm bracelet for my birthday last year and for our anniversary he got me a little charm with a basketball and a hoop. When he said, 'Now I can finally give this one to you as sort of a commemorative thing,' I just started tearing up. I looked at it and that's when I realized this really is it. This charm represents it all being over. It was just the strangest feeling."
Tournament all-star
"We're not one of those teams that has one true superstar, that is obvious. We're so balanced. There is too many of us that are too even so getting the all-star was a bit of a surprise but it was certainly well received."
A sinus infection didn't stop Hole from hooping it up at nationals.
"Before we left and they told me not to fly because my eardrum would explode. I said forget it and overdosed on decongestants and just went with it."
Down by nine early in the final, the Clan closed out the first quarter on a 14-3 run to lead 20-18 as their size advantage wore down the foul-plagued Lancers.
The Clan started the second quarter with six straight points and never looked back en route to a 39-27 advantage at the break.
After three-quarters it was 59-43 as the Lancers were hampered by inconsistent free-throw shooting. In the fourth quarter the Clan would go to lead by 20, their biggest margin of the game.
Laurelle Weigl, the Clan's game MVP from Stony Plain, sank 16 points and reeled in five rebounds. The Clan also outrebounded the Lancers 34-20.
"If I remember correctly in every final the other team jumped out to a early lead right off the bat but that seems to be our tendency. We take that first three or four minutes to kind of get our legs under us, shake our nerves out and then from there it's like the machine kicks into gear and it gets going," said Hole, one of seven Clan players on the roster to win three CIS championships.
Last year the Clan beat the host Regina Cougars 68-62 in the final and in 2007 knocked off the Alberta Pandas 72-68 for national honours.
"This win was very similar to other ones in the sense that every team came out just wanting to physically beat us into the ground. The only way a lot of people think they can beat us is to make us play their game as opposed to the other way around," Hole said. "This year it was not easy at all. We had to fight for everything we got. The scores don't necessarily represent how hard we had to work or how hard the other teams fought."
In the quarter-finals the Clan overwhelmed the host McMaster Marauders 94-76 as Robyn Buna, the CIS player of the year and tournament MVP, rang up 27 points. In the semifinal the Clan prevailed 69-55 against number-four ranked Regina.
"Our coach [Bruce Langford] tore a strip out of us in the Regina game. His comment was something like we set basketball back 50 years just by playing poor penetration defence and not running the plays he wanted us to play," said Hole, the Clan's second-leading scorer against Regina with 15 points.
Memorable season
The Clan finished their last CIS season before going to the NCAA with a 32-1 overall record, including an 18-1 mark in conference play as the Canada West champs.
"I don't take that tournament as a microcosm of the whole season. I think of it more as a separate entity and in the same sense I don't want it to overshadow what this season was. It was hard. We were fighting for so long against a lot more emotional struggles than we've ever had to deal with, like the NCAA shift and the pressure of repeating to dealing with the fact this really is my last season and I'm not ready for this yet."
Hole, 21, averaged 9.7 points, 5.1 boards and 17.8 minutes in 33 games coming off the bench. Her highest scoring-game was 21 points against Winnipeg in late February and she pulled down a season-high 12 rebounds against Calgary in November.
"I wouldn't say it was my best season. If I had to be really honest I would say that the second year [2007/08] felt like the best season, only because I had been so sick in my first year with mono and with my broken wrist [suffered in the pre-game warm-up before the 2007 final] and coming back from it to full health and having a season where I felt like normal me again was so awesome," said Hole, who started in all 40 games while averaging a team-high 13.9 points for the 2008 CIS consolation finalists. "We came in ranked number one and had done so well in league and then we lost our first game at nationals. It was really disappointing."
In four trips to nationals in four years, for Hole, the third championship was the most rewarding.
"This was the best finish but it was the hardest process because we trained longer and harder than we ever had in other seasons. Normally our practices are down to about 65 minutes by the time it hits the end of January and we were going a full two and a half hours until the end of February, hard," said the Team Canada player at the 2007 Summer Universiade.
"My body is happy right now but my heart is not. When my body gets better is when the emotion I think is really going to set in. It's going to be one heck of a strange fall this coming year. It's really going to hit me when September rolls around and I'm doing grad school prep and all that different stuff but there won't be any practices and 5 a.m. wakeups. That's going to be weird."
The high school standout with the Ross Sheppard Thunderbirds not only leaves the Clan with a gaping hole in the middle to fill, but memories to last a lifetime.
"What I'm really going to take away from it is sort of the intangible things, like the really deep strong relationships and friendships I've built with these girls. You don't know girls more intimately than your teammates. They're the girls you wake up with at 5 a.m. five days a week. You're in the change room with them. You see them at least three hours every day. You know what they eat. You know what clothes they wear. You know what scent deodorant they use. You know all these different things you would never know about a best friend but you know because they're your teammates. Those are the things I'm going to remember."
