Championship Dinos happily embrace the role of undersized underdogs

Everyone, by now, knows how the year ended.

Capping their storybook season, the Calgary Dinos captured the U Sports championship Sunday by shading the Ryerson Rams 79-77 in Halifax. The spine-tingling victory gave the men's basketball program its first-ever national title.

Dinos coach Dan Vanhooren, in a way, could see it coming. He'd sensed his group's potential back in October.

In the pre-season — which featured powerhouse opposition such as McGill, Acadia, Ryerson, Brock — the Dinos prevailed in five of six games.

"And we beat some of those teams pretty handily," says Vanhooren. "When you face that (level of competition), when you go at it and see the team perform and come out on top? That definitely delivered some confidence in our ability to get it done."

Members of McGill's coaching staff, following their loss to Calgary, approached Dinos star David Kapinga. "They said they knew we had a special thing going on," says Kapinga, "and I think we all saw that."

Soon enough, the Dinos were munching their way through the Canada West conference, opening with seven straight wins en route to a third-place 16-4 record. Calgary then knocked aside Saskatchewan, UBC, and Alberta in the playoffs to earn a berth in the national tournament. All this, despite a considerable height disadvantage.

"Do we look like a basketball team? We look like a soccer team," Vanhooren said Monday morning at Calgary International Airport, shortly after the team returned from Halifax. "If you watched Ryerson walk through here, with their seven-foot-three centre and everybody else, you'd think, 'Well, there's a basketball team.'"

No matter. The Dinos happily embraced the role of undersized underdogs.

"We know that basketball is not just about height," says Kapinga, five foot 11. "It's about skills. It's about heart. It's about defence, the X's and O's."

For the Dinos, it marked their third straight trip to nationals. They'd placed second in 2016, fifth in 2017 — both times suffering disheartening losses at the hands of Carleton, the eventual champion.

This time Ryerson toppled Carleton. Meanwhile, on the other side of the bracket, the Dinos, with triumphs over Brock and McGill, advanced to the gold-medal match.

In heart-pounding fashion, Mambi Diawara's last-second basket gave the Dinos a two-point decision and Canadian bragging rights.

"Unbelievable," Diawara says. "We've been overlooked and overlooked. Between our 12 players and the coaching staff, we knew how good we were. I'm just thankful we had a chance to show the country how good we were."

Perhaps, finally, the Dinos made believers of the basketball world. That's the hope of Connor Foreman.

"Everyone ignoring us, everyone downplaying our accomplishments, it builds, it builds, it builds," he says. "Every time we win something and someone's saying, 'Oh, they got lucky,' or, 'Oh, they're streaky shooters and they got hot behind the three-point line.' Coming in for the next practice, the next game, the next day, that fire is just building. And now I don't think there's much left to be said, right?"

For Foreman and Jhony Verrone, the team's graduating players, the moment resonates even more.

"Words can't explain (the emotion)," says Foreman. "It's a great way to close out my basketball career … a wonderful cap to put on it. There's no more unfinished business."

It had also been an awfully long wait for the coach — and for the school, which had never laid claim to the W.P. McGee Trophy.

"I started in 2000 … that's 18 tries," says Vanhooren. "It just tells you how hard it is to do. It took 51 attempts, when you think about it, for our men's basketball team here at the U of C to actually win one. To be part of that, it feels really great."

In the spotlight now for UCalgary, which boasted a total of 149 Academic All-Canadians, is the women's volleyball crew. The Dinos are the top seed at the national tournament in Quebec City, which opens Friday.