FROM APRIL 2020 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

The Blues’ basketball program is only in its third year, and its competitors are prep school teams with deep resources and better facilities. But under coach Kevin Jeffers, they made it to the semis, and proved they’re the ones to watch

If you come late to a Central Tech Blues game, there’s almost nowhere to sit. The stadium’s deeply uncomfortable blue plastic bleachers are filled with students, parents, siblings and teachers, all sweating in their winter jackets. There are multiple photographers moving around the perimeter of the gym, plus a cameraman standing off to the side, live-streaming the game against Brantford’s TRC Academy to the Ontario Scholastic Basketball Association’s YouTube channel. To their right sit Blues coach Kevin Jeffers and his assistants, in collared shirts and ties, along with Jeffers’s 10-year-old son, Kenyon, who looks like a miniature staff member.

The team’s uniforms are crisp white and blue; the fluorescent lighting in the gym is retina searing. The buzzer is about three-quarters of a second longer than you’d like it to be. It feels like high school – active, chaotic, full of yelling and laughing and cheering. At halftime, principal Lisa Edwards works the concession stand, selling beef patties and neon slushies while students rush the floor to shoot hoops. When I ask her if the games are always this loud, she just laughs.

At the start of the third quarter the home team is up by two points, but it feels like they’re winning by more. The kids around me are keeping up a running commentary, chanting, “DEFENCE! DEFENCE!” in a loose round. When a Blues player narrowly misses a rim-rattling dunk, the guy behind me jerks forward so violently I catch his knee between my shoulder blades, but I’m so caught up in the action I barely notice.

The Blues are a fun team to watch when they’re locked in: Their play is aggressive, confident, dynamic. Point guard Kalyem Liburd-Mullings swiftly shoulders his way through a crowd of defenders to take a tough shot in traffic, falling down dramatically on his back as it swishes through the net. A few minutes later, Malachi Davis, a guard with a lanky, kinetic style that makes him look like he’s balancing on a tightrope, chases down a rebound off the glass and tosses it to small forward Jamal Fuller, who lays in a picturesque alley-oop as the kids around me whoop and cheer. When a player from the other team takes a shot, all the Blues starters yell “SHORT!” so completely in chorus it sounds like one voice.

If you come late to a Central Tech Blues practice, you will spend 15 minutes living out a stress dream as you wander through the halls of an enormous high school, searching for a room whose location you do not actually know. By the time I find it, Jeffers is already giving the team a stern lecture in a strong voice: “You guys know me. I’ll never say anything nice about you to your faces,” he says. “So I’m not trying to gas you up. But I think you can actually win this thing. The thing is, you can’t just be doing things for yourself. It has to be for the team.”

Later, he tells me this speech was impromptu, sparked by a bad practice the week before. “They never do anything without getting a talk before and after,” he explains, tugging open the door to the Central Tech Stadium. “And sometimes you just have to let them know how much they’re throwing away.”

Today’s practice is actually an “ID session,” a kind of group audition where younger kids can come and show off their skills for a chance to be on next year’s team. There must be almost 40 teen boys in here and the smell is overpowering—sweat and rubber thickening the windowless gym air. Current Blues players mingle in with the would-be new kids, leading the drills and dunking cheerfully on top of them. Jeffers mentions proudly to me that they only put out the call for this ID session a few days earlier.

From the turnout, you’d never guess that CTS’s basketball prep program is only a few years old. Jeffers started coaching here in 2017, and the Blues only entered the Ontario Scholastic Basketball Association last year. CTS is not the only public school in the OSBA, but many of the teams they play against are from prep schools designed specifically to be training grounds for elite players, with nutritionists, state-of-the-art facilities and tuition that can rise over $30,000 a year. These schools are no joke—Orangeville Prep, which went undefeated in the West this past regular season, boasts the NBA players Jamal Murray and Thon Maker as alumni.

Central Tech’s prep program is the brainchild of principal Edwards, a former basketball player herself. Jeffers spent 14 years coaching the basketball team at Eastern Commerce, leading them to championships and provincial titles. When ECS shut down due to low enrolment in 2015, he was contemplating switching to college ball, but Edwards offered him the chance to make a real difference, plus a plan to fully support the prep program.

“In the past,” Jeffers tells me, “this school was known for three things: football, track and violence. [Edwards] wanted to change that.” He’s referring to two highly publicized news items: a 2010 shooting that injured a 17-year-old student, and a 2015 stabbing that sent a 19-year-old to the hospital with a collapsed lung. But Jeffers is being hyperbolic. Central Tech’s history is more multifaceted than these incidents. The school currently serves nearly 1,600 students from a diverse range of communities, homes and cultures. The building is enormous, with a broad array of facilities and programs. You might know an adult who’s taken a night class in ceramics or welding there. There’s an autobody shop, carpentry studios, a bronze foundry. Maybe you’ve just biked past Bathurst and Harbord on a late summer evening and seen one of my favourite Toronto tableaux: the football team doing drills against the periwinkle dusk, a little glimmer of Friday Night Lights hidden in plain sight just off Bloor.

But whatever you might have known Central Tech for, it probably wasn’t basketball—until now. Under Jeffers’s leadership, the Blues have already attracted a Jordan sponsorship and enough media attention that the players have to sign waivers at the beginning of the season. Adrian Fenty, a videographer with the Blacktop Classic, an outdoor tournament the Blues won last year, tells me they’re an easy team to root for. “There used to be more teams like this in the city—Jarvis, Eastern Commerce—but now almost everything is centred around the prep schools. This is the last real program in city basketball. It’s been cool to see this team come up with a bit of a chip on their shoulder. It’s a true underdog story.”

Assistant coach Omar Bryan says the main obstacle standing between this year’s team and a championship is focus—something that makes sense for a group of highschool-aged boys. “There are lots of distractions. Some kids want to hang with their friends, some want to look good, some want to go pro. Everyone has different motivations, so the key is getting them all to focus on the same goal. They have the talent, the skill; it’s just about making it all come together.”

Bryan says that every group he’s coached has a different collective character. I mention this to Jamal Fuller during practice as he sits in front of me on the bleachers, icing a twisted ankle. When I ask what he thinks this team’s personality is, he tells me, “All over the place. The players here come from everywhere—Scarborough, Brampton, all over the city—but when we focus and work hard, we win.” Fuller himself is from Jane and Finch; Malachi Davis, who grew up in Scarborough but now lives in the West End, agrees: “Our style of basketball is just push and have fun. When we do it [Jeffers’s] way we get dunks, we get threes, everyone’s always smiling and having a good time.”

Jeffers tells me he never promises parents he can get their kid a scholarship, or even many minutes, but he does promise to teach them a strong work ethic. Off the court he exudes genuine warmth, and I frequently see him laughing and joking with players before practices. In our conversations he’s unfailingly friendly, speaking in cheerful platitudes and flashing an easy grin. He brings his 10-year-old twins to almost every practice and game, where the Blues players greet them like fellow team members and shoot hoops with them during breaks. During one conversation, Jeffers scrolls through his phone to show me a photo of Kenyon sitting next to him on the bench; their postures and facial expressions are identical. Later, while searching for this picture on his Instagram, I will come across a photo of Jeffers wearing a shirt that says “World’s Greatest FARTER..... I MEAN FATHER.”

But when he’s pushing his players, Jeffers can be intense, and even harsh. He does not shy away from raising his voice, and sometimes his exhortations are so over-the-top they seem like parodies of things an angry coach might say. At one practice after a disappointing game, I hear him yell at a slow-moving player that he’s going to punch the kid’s dad. Later that same evening, after he’s concluded they aren’t taking practice seriously enough, Jeffers makes the whole team run ladder drills for over an hour. Halfway through, as the students are red-faced and shaking, sliding down the walls, his daughter asks why he’s making them run so much. “They’re making themselves run,” he tells her, loud enough for both them and me to hear. “They’re mentally weak, and it shows in games, and now it’s showing in practice.” When the final buzzer sounds and the players limp out of the gym, gulping air, I tell him I feel exhausted just from watching. “You’re seeing it all, here,” he says. “The good, the bad and the ugly.”

After a less stressful practice, I sit in the gym with Davis, a player who exudes a goofy energy in breaks, but is clearly serious about his role on the court. I frequently notice him hanging out before and after practices just getting reps in, shooting hoops with whoever’s around. When I mention that Jeffers’s coaching style can seem intense, he nods. “Yeah, ’cause he just wants the best for us. Coaches aren’t usually tough on people they don’t care about. If he’s tough on you, he’s showing that he wants the best for you. He just wants you to be in a good position.”

The team’s record seems like an argument in favour of this approach. The Blues have gone from a 6 and 13 record last year to being second in the East going into this year’s playoffs, with only four losses. Fuller has already signed to Hill College in Texas; two other senior players are considering options in the States; and Liburd-Mullings is heading to U of T.

When I ask Davis, who is in his final year, how the basketball program has impacted his life, he answers immediately. “It’s keeping me off the streets. All the friends I grew up with, they’re on a different path than I am. I took the basketball path. I’m always in the gym, just working, and then I go home.

“I’m just trying to make it better for myself. A lot of people in my family, they didn’t really have these opportunities in their years. They didn’t have coaches to open the gym for them after school, in the morning. Just having this opportunity, you gotta take advantage of it and make the best of it.” When I ask if there’s anything else he wants to tell me about the program, he thinks for a second. “Nah. It’s just... it’s been a good experience.” A small pause. “I’m gonna miss high school basketball.”

Fifteen minutes before the last game of the Blues’ regular season, against Bill Crothers Prep, the gym is packed again. People are claiming spots on the stairs, leaning against the walls, wandering up and down the bleachers looking vainly for a place to squeeze into. I’ve managed to find a spot behind a cluster of family members, easily identifiable because they’re all wearing shirts with their kids’ names and numbers on the back. (Davis’s have a picture of him dunking on the front.) Some parents and grandparents are clutching portraits of their children, given out to the players in a ceremony before the game. Others are inflating black plastic thunder sticks, using them to drum out nervous rhythms.

The gym smells like a room full of excited, overheating young adults: deodorant, body spray, sugar, hair product, sneaker rubber, faint drift of weed. The outfits are universally fantastic. A boy on Crothers’s side who can be no older than 18 is wearing track pants and an oversized T-shirt printed with the cover of WHAM!’s Last Christmas album. (It’s mid-February.) Someone accidentally steps on my hand with a pair of glossy lime-green Air Force 1’s the size of bread loaves. I feel like the only human being on Earth who does not own AirPods.

By tipoff, the room is vibrating with collective energy. You can feel the crowd waiting to be activated; when the players get close to the basket, there’s an audible intake of breath. The parents are leading the crowd in a call-and-response chant, shouting, “WHOSE WAY? TECH WAY!” and dancing in their seats. It feels like something big is going to happen.

But the game gets off to a rough start. The basket seems to be physically repelling the Blues’ shots, and by the end of the first quarter they’re down 10–18. By the middle of the second quarter, the crowd’s energy has simmered into a nervous silence, and by its end things are so tense that I can hear Jeffers yelling from the sidelines. Just before half-time, a kid standing near the wall gets bonked in the head by a frantic pass gone off-course, and there is a brief but welcome moment of physical comedy as he pantomimes falling into his friends, all of them cracking up. The energy seems to lift for a moment. When the buzzer goes it’s 28–34—by no means an impossible gap. No one leaves their seats at halftime.

In the third quarter, Crothers comes back strong. Their defence is swift and aggressive, smothering each Blues player before they can even think about making space to shoot. “They just see everything we’re doing,” marvels the guy next to me. It’s like watching someone stamp out a fire. The Blues’ bench players are tipping their chairs back so far they might fall over. The starters are looking dejected. One of the coaching staff stands with his hand on Liburd-Mullings’s back as he gives him a play, and when he’s finished he gently but firmly pushes him back into the game, like he’s launching a toy boat out into the sea.

Near the end of the game there’s a little burst of momentum, a glimmer of possibility—Fuller executes two beautiful dunks, and each time the crowd releases a blast of pent-up excitement—but the game moves too fast for them to catch it. A Crothers player picks off a long pass, a Blues player misses a basket by a hair, someone falls down and stays down a beat too long, and suddenly the quiet of the room has given way to something worse: mundane chatter. People are talking about how uncomfortable the seats are, deciding where to go after this. The game ends 66–81, and the Blues walk off the floor looking deflated. It’s the worst loss I have seen them take so far.

“They were playing for themselves, not the team,” Jeffers tells me later, when I ask what he thinks happened – an echo of the speech he gave the team at that first practice. Fortunately, this loss doesn’t end the year for the Blues; it just puts them in a tougher spot in the playoffs. The finals will take place over one weekend in March, and after that the players will scatter to other cities, other countries, other schools, while the prep program will continue on.

But for now, it’s hard not to root for this team. The energy at this last game reminded me of the charge that electrified the city during the Raptors’ championship run. Sitting on those hard plastic seats, I felt the same familiar helium lift in my chest, the same sense of being swept up in something joyful and swift, forward-moving. But while loving the NBA can be an exercise in projection and metaphor, watching the Blues play, it’s impossible not to think of the real-life stakes unfolding before you. These young men’s early lives have not yet been compressed into media-ready narratives. Instead, they’re being built right now, in real time, out there on the floor.

A playoff run would mean something significant for the team; it would signify a tangible change in the lives of its players, as well as in the life of the school they represent. As I leave the gym for the last time, I remember something Jeffers said when I remarked on the bright whiteness of its walls. “Let me tell you, it did not look like this when I got here. There was tar dripping from the ceiling, all kinds of things.” He surveyed the length of the floor, watching his players sprint back and forth across it. “Now all it needs is some banners.”

Central Tech lost in the semi-finals to Bill Crothers—a hard-fought 87-93. Jamal Fuller had 39 points and Malachi Davis had 17.