Six Rides, One Bridge, and a Weekend I Almost Didn't Believe I Was Living

There's a version of this story where I never end up in a gym in Edmonton at all.

I work construction. Mornings on job sites, forming concrete, building high rises, the kind of work that doesn't leave much room for basketball, let alone a career built around scouting it.

I wasn't a recruited player. That path never opened up for me. So every single time Sunny Sooch flies me out to Edmonton to cover his event, I don't take it for granted.

Not for one second.

This was year four, and if anything, it means more now than it did the first time.

The tournament itself has earned its reputation the hard way, by actually producing players. Arafan Diané went on to commit to Houston. Hudson Ward ended up at Penn State the first year. Kavon Bradford landed at Buffalo. David Hansen went to Weber State. Those aren't small programs, and those are names that came directly out of this event, in this gym, in front of the kind of eyes that were in the building again this year.

Division I coaches flying up from Idaho a full year early for a 2028 prospect isn't a coincidence. It's what happens when a program builds real credibility over real years, and Sunny and his staff have built exactly that, weekend after weekend, year after year, always treating me like family when I show up.

The basketball is only half of what stuck with me this time. On the Sunday, after the last game wrapped, I went out and explored Edmonton on my own, and somewhere in the middle of that I realized I'd taken an Uber, a bus, a subway, an e-scooter across that white bridge that shows up in every skyline shot of the city, and then an airplane, all in about twelve hours, before driving my own car home.

Six different ways of getting from one place to another in a single day, all in service of watching kids play a game I love. I don't know how else to describe that except lucky.

Genuinely, ridiculously lucky.

This trip I also leaned into something new: I put the laptop away entirely and worked off handwritten notes for all three days of basketball. It's been a game changer. Writing something down by hand, in the moment, makes it stick in a way that typing never did and scrolling back through hours of game video never will. There's something about the pen moving while the play is still happening that locks the read into memory.

People have started noticing too, coming up to me at my own son's practice to say they like that I still write things down, that it feels old school in a good way. What they don't realize is how much sharper the actual evaluations have gotten because of it. It's not nostalgia. It's just a better way to watch.

So before any of the player breakdowns come out of this weekend, and there are a lot of them coming, I wanted to just say the thing plainly.

Thank you.

To Sunny Sooch and the entire WCPA staff for the hospitality, for trusting me with a front row seat to what they're building, and for believing a construction worker from Ontario could add value to what's happening out there.

There is elite talent in Western Canada that the East Coast simply is not seeing yet. That's the gap The Maple Minute exists to close, and getting to do it from inside a gym in Edmonton, four years running, is not something I will ever stop being grateful for.