The 12th annual Cochrane Classic basketball tournament is set to get underway on Dec. 12 through until the 14th, and it could go down as one of the best yet.
The schedule will feature 32 teams from across Alberta playing in the four-division "Oregon Draw" style tournament, where the formatting forces you to win all three of your games in order to win the gold medal. Each division will hold eight teams while also featuring teams from Bow Valley, Cochrane High, and St. Timothy in each respective bracket.
Organizer Doug Jensen, who also doubles as the Cobras senior girls coach said preparation for the tournament has been going quite well in the last couple of weeks before the games get underway.
"It's going pretty smoothly," Jensen said. "It's been great working with the other two schools, they've been on board with what we've been doing and I've had a great working relationship with Eric (Richard) at Bow Valley and Leo (Keefer) at St. Tims ... the more times we do this, the easier it gets."
The Cochrane Classic is one of the premier basketball tournaments in the province and has morphed from a lesser-known event into one of the pillars in the Cochrane sports community.
"Commitment from everyone involved. I initially came up with this idea when I first started at Cochrane High 12 years ago and it stemmed from just being a Cochrane High tournament the first year to expanding with Bow Valley joining the second or third year and St. Tim's jumped on board after that," Jensen said.
"Just the fact that it's a community event that everyone looks forward to this time of year ... we all kind of have the same goals and philosophy. It's continued on since the beginning and it hasn't really been a challenge in making it an annual event, people look forward to planning and participating in the tournament."
Jensen also noted that it's huge for the tournament to be able to get buy-in from both St. Tim's and Bow Valley. The tournament wouldn't be able to run as smoothly with only one gym instead of three while also allowing the opportunity for each school's student body to go and cheer on their fellow classmates.
"It (the tournament) would fail without it (the support of the other two schools) to be perfectly frank," he said. "If they don't want to be involved, they don't have to be ... it doesn't take a lot of convincing and it's up to the individual athletic directors at the school to organize their own venues, but by-in, convincing them to be part of this event does not take a long time."
"It's not a lot of work, I think we all love doing it and all love creating this opportunity for our kids to show their skills, be in the spotlight for a couple of days and it doesn't take a lot of buy-in at all."
Another thing Jensen added was the fact that this tournament wouldn't run without volunteers outside of the schools.
"We would not be able to pull this tournament off without a whole bunch of volunteers," he said. "Not only from the business community in Cochrane but also the parent volunteers as well."
"People step up every year and we get a lot more volunteer participation than we need. We're looking for small jobs for people who want to be involved and that's a testament to the people in the community. It's really great living in a medium-sized community where there is that connection between the community and even between schools. We're rivals with Bow Valley and St. Timothy but we put that aside for this weekend, work together and just have a great weekend."
Minus the three Cochrane teams, there will be teams from various spots in the province. Canmore, Highwood in High River, Ardrossan, Strathmore and a number of teams from Calgary will show their stuff and try to bring a championship win back to their respective school.
"We've been using an this format (Oregon Draw) for at least 10 years of the tournament," Jensen said. "The make-up of the teams change from year-to-year, but inevitably we still have teams from across the province wanting to join, mostly within our zone in the ASAA (Alberta Schools' Athletic Association) and that has been the focus."
"We don't invite any other Rocky View Schools other than Bow Valley and ourselves because we see them regularly in league play, so we try to invite teams from our zone but also from across the province as well. We get some of the best 2A, 3A and even some 4A teams joining the fold as well."
Many of the teams have only played a handful of games coming into the tournament, it gives each Cochrane team a good chance to see other teams from Alberta, ones they may match up with down the line in provincials or zones while also getting to know themselves.
"We try and invite some good, competitive 3A schools from the province and it is a good measuring stick to see how we match up against them," said Jensen who is in his first year of coaching the Cobras girls team.
"We are at the beginning of the season so most teams have only played three or four games up to this point and we're still learning about ourselves and teams from our zone so yeah it's a great opportunity for us to do some learning about ourselves."
All three senior Cochrane teams will begin play at various times on Friday with games beginning at either 9 or 10:45 a.m. The junior teams however will kick off the tournament on Thursday with games going as early as 4 p.m with St. Timothy and Highwood as well as Cochrane and Crescent Heights in that time slot.
