For the University of the Fraser Valley women's basketball team, the whole has always been greater than the sum of its parts, as head coach Al Tuchscherer has built a national powerhouse without any one player putting up ostentatious scoring numbers.
Last season, for instance, Aiesha Luyken led the Cascades' balanced attack with 13.4 points per game, which was good for just 14th-best in Canada West. This season, UFV top scorer Sarah Wierks's 11.9 points per game ranked 19th in the league.
And Tuchscherer likes it that way.
The Cascades' blueprint for sweeping the Calgary Dinos in their first-round Canada West playoff series this week, though, veered somewhat from that egalitarian approach.
Both nights, Nataliia Gavryliuk gave UFV its swagger and spark on offence. In Thursday's 67-48 Game 1 victory, the first-year Cascade from Kiev, Ukraine racked up a game-high 17 points, along with 11 rebounds and five assists.
On Saturday, she rained down three-pointers at key junctures to power the Cascades to a 60-48 win and a sweep of the best-of-three set. Her 18 points were once again a game-high, and the entire outburst came via the trey – she shot a tidy 6-for-9 from beyond the arc.
Asked whether the weekend constituted a coming-out party of sorts for Gavryliuk, Tuchscherer chuckled.
"I'm always hesitant to say stuff like that, because I take a lot of pride in having a team that has a lot of depth and a lot of weapons on it," he said. "But yeah, she played well."
Coaxing Tuchscherer to praise an individual scoring performance might be like pulling teeth, but he was pleased with the character his entire group showed in closing out a tough Calgary team went to nationals last season under head coach Damian Jennings.
The Cascades trailed 12-8 after a low-scoring first quarter, but managed to claw their way to a 33-30 lead at halftime.
In the third quarter, UFV put together a stretch of dominant basketball befitting their status as the No. 5-ranked team in the nation. They locked down the Dinos on defence which led to transition baskets, and they out-scored Calgary 16-6 in the frame to seize control.
"It's always hard to knock a team out that's been to nationals before," Tuchscherer noted. "It didn't look fantastic, but I thought they (the Dinos) really competed hard tonight, really came at us. Once we made a couple of adjustments defensively, I thought we were pretty good.
"We tend to grind teams down a little bit, and that run happened in the third quarter."
The Cascades also got double-figure scoring from Sarah Wierks and Kayli Sartori (11 points apiece), while Tamara Jarrett, with 14 points, was the only such performer for the Dinos, who shot just 24.5 per cent from the field as a team.
The UFV women punched their ticket to the Canada West Final Four for the fourth consecutive year, and they'll be looking to earn a return trip to the CIS national championship tourney after making their debut there in 2013.
The Final Four location and match-ups have yet to be determined. The Regina Cougars, No. 4 in the nation, are the only other team to secure a berth thus far.
"Whoever's there is going to be pretty tough, but not daunting enough that we can't or haven't beaten those teams before," Tuchscherer said.
"I've been preaching all year that we want to be getting better as the season goes on, and I think we are. We're playing as good basketball as we've played all season."
The Cascades got some reasonably good news on forward Katie Brink, who departed Thursday's game with an ankle injury. It's not broken, but it is seriously sprained, and Tuchscherer estimated she's a minimum of two weeks away.
UFV MEN FALL TO VIKES
The UFV men's hoopsters saw their shooting touch desert them at an inopportune moment – the Canada West semifinals.
At the Final Four tourney hosted by the Alberta Golden Bears in Edmonton, the Cascades faced the Victoria Vikes on Friday afternoon with a national championship berth on the line. But they struggled mightily against the league's top defensive squad, shooting just 29 per cent from the field, including an abysmal 1-for-25 from three-point range.
The Vikes led by as many as 30 points en route to a 77-57 victory, and thus ended the Cascades' program-record 16-game winning streak.
Victoria moves on to face host Alberta in the final, while UFV plays the Saskatchewan Huskies for bronze at 2 p.m. Pacific time on Saturday. The game can be streamed online at canadawest.tv.
The Vikes got big games from Marcus Tibbs (16 points), Chris McLaughlin (15 points, 10 rebounds) and Terrell Evans (10 points, 10 rebounds), while the top-scoring Cascades were Klaus Figueredo (13 points), Kadeem Willis (12) and Kevon Parchment (11).