Maple Ridge's dominant basketball program has another banner to hang.
The Ravens' senior girls' basketball team shut down Barrie North's b-squad 52-24 at home on Wednesday to defend the SCAA triple-A title.
It's the third straight league championship for Maple Ridge, which will move on to play the winner of Thursday's CSASC final between St. Peter's and St. Joan of Arc in the GBSSA Championship Game.
Gia LoGreco led all scorers with 16 points on 5-for-12 shooting, including four threes, along with seven rebounds.
Ashlyn Macey and Rylie Tutty also reached double digits in points for the Ravens, with 14 and 16, respectively. Macey was 5-for-11 from the field while Tutty had a game-high five assists.
Maple Ridge rode a dominant first half to extend its SCAA win streak to 27 (including playoffs), but a relative far cry from its 75-10 performance against Barrie North in the league title game in 2025.
The junior-age Vikings team, which scored the most points the undefeated Ravens in any game this season, held tough for the first few minutes of the game, but turnovers mounted across multiple possessions, giving Maple Ridge the room to break things open.
"We're pretty confident that if we do the things that we do for 32 minutes, we can beat anybody," Ravens head coach Connor Laronde told Barrie360 postgame. "We had a little bit of game prep personnel for them, but it was more about let's just execute our stuff."
A one-point second quarter sunk them, however, allowing the Ravens to break out to a 35-8 halftime lead. Across the first half, the Vikings shot just 2-for-18 from the field, including 0-for-10 from three-point range.
Laronde says a standout number like that isn't exactly the desired outcome for his team.
"It actually makes the second half a little bit tougher because you have to go and prove it even more," he said. "We've all seen and been a part of games where you have a lead and then all of a sudden it just chips away and then all of a sudden it's a game again."
Despite a few early Vikings buckets and outscoring Maple Ridge 9-7 in the third quarter, the Ravens brought consistent offensive pressure throughout the remainder of the game.
Just as Barrie North was putting together what could've been a miraculous fourth-quarter comeback thanks to threes by Taylen Brock and Zoe Trudel, the team took fouls on back-to-back trips down the floor along with a technical foul on head coach Angus Roy, who was audibly unhappy with the officiating.
Brock led the Vikings with 10 points, despite going just 3-for-19 from the field, while Mae Viera added eight points and a game-high 15 rebounds before fouling out.
While Maple Ridge, the defending provincial champion, is already into this month's OFSAA championships as the host, Laronde says his team is more concerned with the journey to get there.
"We don't want to just get there because we're hosting, we want to earn our way there," he said. "This was kind of the first step in getting there."
