Regular readers know this space is usually about schools. This post is a little different.
It is summer, the pace is different, and I want to write about something work-adjacent that has been part of my life for more than a decade. Consider this my version of a summer read.
Yesterday, the girls’ side of BBall Nationals wrapped up in Langley. For nine of the last eleven years, this tournament has been how our VK Basketball season ends. After a spring and summer of travel across North America, there is something right about finishing at home, in front of family, watching how much these young women have grown since April.
This year the ending feels a little different.
Katie, our youngest daughter, has her Grade 12 year ahead of her, so there are still school seasons in front of us. But after four kids and so many years in so many sports, I can feel the beginning of the lasts. And this was the last summer of club basketball.
After eleven seasons connected to VK, I find myself wanting to write down what I have seen and what I think it means.
This is not a goodbye post. I hope to stay involved in some way. But chapters deserve endings, and endings deserve some reflection.
A Family Affair
VK Basketball played its first season in 2016. We have been there since the beginning.
Our older daughter Elizabeth played for four years, and then stayed involved helping with coaching. Katie, our youngest, has played for seven. Our two sons, sandwiched in between the girls, both worked for VK at different times while in university. Somewhere along the way this stopped being an activity our family did and became part of who our family is.
I was drawn in immediately by the mission.
Anyone who has spent time in youth sports knows the landscape. Club programs were becoming increasingly expensive, and too often they felt transactional, selling families promises about scholarships and exposure with invoices to match. VK was a response to that. It was built to give young women the best possible experience: high-quality basketball, top-level coaching, strong community, and the joy of travelling and experiencing places across North America together.
Not as a product to be purchased. As an opportunity to be shared.
The economics are worth pausing on, because they are the heart of what makes VK different. The true cost of this kind of experience, once you add up travel, gym rentals, tournament fees, coaching, and the many other pieces that make a spring and summer season possible, is significant. Families at VK pay a fraction of the true cost. The rest is covered by the generosity and vision of founder Anthony Beyrouti, the sponsors and donors he has brought alongside, and a community of parents and kids who volunteer, give back, and pay it forward so the next group can have the same chance.
Anthony would be uncomfortable with too much attention here, so I will simply say this: it takes a particular kind of vision to look at a broken marketplace and decide the answer is to build something better and give it away.
Kids notice that modelling. So do their parents.
The Miles and the Moments
Ask anyone connected to VK about their favourite memories and they will not start with a final score.
They will tell you about the van rides from San Francisco to Los Angeles, or Louisville to Chicago. About a bus trip that started in Montreal and wound through Ottawa and Niagara Falls before finishing in Chicago. About looking up in a tournament gym and realizing Shaq was there.
For me, the trips were made in the side quests.
A tour of Parliament in Ottawa. A scavenger hunt through Montreal. A day at Disneyland. A quick detour to the White House, which in hindsight was undersold as a quick detour.
And a recurring bit the girls came to dread: me, in front of some landmark, explaining a television show their parents watched growing up. Buckingham Fountain in Chicago, from the opening credits of Married with Children. The Full House house in San Francisco. The blank stares only teenagers can deliver, every single time.
Not every stop landed. The hike to the MASH filming site was, I was informed at some length, not what the group had in mind.
I have spent thirty years in education. I know a teachable moment when I see one, even when my audience does not.
This is the part of youth sports we undersell. The basketball is the reason everyone shows up, but the life memories happen on the way to the gym and after the buzzer. Eleven summers of North America, seen through hotel lobbies, team dinners, airport gates, long drives, and the occasional tourist stop squeezed between games.
Close to two hundred nights in hotels over eleven summers.
Our kids will carry those memories long after they forget the scores.
The Part That Surprised Me
If I am honest, there is a tension I did not fully anticipate when this started.
VK entered a space increasingly dominated by for-profit clubs. A new entrant with a completely different model, one that dramatically reduced cost as a barrier, was not just a novelty. It challenged some assumptions. And not everyone welcomed that.
Over the years I have heard comments about VK that simply were not true. That has been disappointing, but also instructive. New models are rarely welcomed by everyone, even in youth sports. Maybe especially in youth sports.
Some predicted VK would last a year.
Then came 2020, which tested every prediction about everything. That summer, we pivoted the entire program outdoors. I will always be thankful for the courts at Pitt River Middle School in Port Coquitlam, where a season that could have disappeared happened anyway, in the fresh air, with kids who were just happy to be playing.
Here it is, eleven seasons later.
What has kept it strong, I think, is the quality of people recruited into the program. I remember a conversation with coaches in the early years where we agreed on something that has stuck with me ever since: talent mattered, but fit mattered too. We wanted players and families who understood that this was not just about being seen. It was about being part of something.
When you are not driven by profit, you have a luxury most clubs do not. You can look for character with talent, not talent at any cost.
Eleven summers later, some of these coaches are among my closest friends. Anthony is one of them. We have coached together for four summers, and what started around the program became a friendship well beyond it. Danie Gardner and I got involved in the first summer, when our daughters played together. Her daughter Makenna graduated years ago. Danie never left. She has coached alongside me for five of these summers, and she is one of the best coaches, mentors, and friends I have found anywhere. One summer I shared a hotel room with Paul Langford for more than thirty nights. You do not do that with a colleague. You do that with a friend, or you do it once and never again. I did not expect any of this part. You sign up thinking it is about your kid, and somewhere along the way you find you have built something of your own.
That does not mean shying away from excellence. VK fields some of the very top teams in Canada, competes in the Nike EYBL Champions League as the only program in Western Canada to do so, and has helped dozens of young women continue playing at universities and colleges across Canada and the United States.
My daughter Elizabeth’s university basketball experience at StFX likely would not have happened without VK. There are many young women with their own version of that sentence.
The quest now is to be among the elite in North America, and there is still room to grow. Maybe it is doing different things at younger ages. Maybe it is seeing more top athletes choose basketball at a time when other sports are pulling them toward early specialization. Maybe it is continuing to build a wider pathway across the province so more girls see a place for themselves in the game.
It is a curious balance, and I have come to believe it is the right one. Unapologetic about wanting excellence, for the team and for each individual, but never solely driven by it.
The Quiet Months
VK’s season runs from April into early August. The rest of the year, the program is quiet.
That is a smaller thing than the mission or the coaching, but I have come to appreciate it. In a lot of clubs, across a lot of sports, the pull toward year-round commitment arrives early and rarely lets up. VK steps back and lets kids play school sports. Basketball, yes, but also everything else.
Both of my daughters played four or five high school sports while playing for VK. It mattered to our family that they did not have to choose one sport, one path, or one identity too early. It mattered that they could be serious about basketball and still be fully part of their school communities.
Much of the research on early specialization points in the same direction. For most kids, most of the time, more variety is better than less.
I do not think this is the most important thing about VK. But it is a design choice, and design choices tell you what an organization is actually for. When the model is not built around keeping kids enrolled year-round, you can make choices around what is actually good for them.
More Models, Please
There is a much bigger conversation happening right now about youth sports. Costs are out of control. Kids are dropping out. Families are stretched. The pressure to specialize keeps arriving earlier. The gap between who gets access to elite experiences and who does not keeps widening.
I want to make a smaller, closer-to-home argument. We tend to assume youth sports come in two flavours: traditional community programs and for-profit clubs.
VK is proof there is at least a third way.
Let me be clear about the limits. VK is not fully replicable in every sport at every level. It exists because a philanthropist was willing to fund it at a level most communities cannot count on. I understand the critique. But I have come to believe that is a reason to study it, not dismiss it.
One of the quiet lessons of these eleven years is how many successful people I have encountered, in my professional and personal life, who are genuinely willing, and often eager, to give back in support of young people. The generosity is out there. What is often missing is the model, and the people willing to build it.
VK has disrupted the assumptions in one sport, in one region, for one generation of girls. Every kid who got to play at a level that likely would not otherwise have been available to them is evidence that the assumptions were wrong.
And that is what connects this post back to schools.
For eleven years, I have watched a mission-driven organization try to hold two ideas at once: remove barriers and raise expectations. That is the work of every good school system too. We should never accept the false choice between access and excellence. We should be suspicious of any model that says only some kids get the best experiences. And we should keep looking for ways to build systems where young people can be challenged, supported, stretched, and known.
VK did not teach me those values. But it gave me another place to see them lived.
The Next Chapter
So this is where I land, at the end of eleven summers.
Our family’s playing chapter with VK is closing. The last summer club season. The last long travel stretch. The last time this particular rhythm will organize our family calendar.
For years, spring and summer meant flights, gyms, laundry, group chats, hotel breakfasts, rental vans, late dinners, early alarms, and figuring out which kid needed to be where. Then one day, the last game of that chapter ends.
I have coached a lot of these girls, including many of this year’s oldest players for more than two hundred games and Elizabeth’s team, years ago, for the better part of a hundred and fifty. Group after group, from the first practice to the last, one game at a time. Yesterday, one more of those chapters closed in Langley.
I will miss it more than I am letting on here.
But I am not leaving youth sports. I leave this chapter more convinced than ever that the next work in youth sport is to build better models. Models that never ask families to choose between what they can afford and what their kids get to experience. Models that let kids chase being great and still play everything. Models that let them see the continent, grow up alongside teammates, and be part of something that feels bigger than a season.
VK showed me it can be done.
Eleven seasons, and counting.
The girls’ tournament in Langley is over. Somewhere, a ten-year-old is picking up a basketball for the first time.
I hope someone is busy building something worthy of her.