​​​By Hilary Angus, North Shore News

The Seycove Secondary senior girls celebrate their win the in the provincial AA field hockey championship final. | Clayton Harrington​

It was an all-North Shore battle in the final of the BC School Sports senior girls AA provincial field hockey championships held Nov. 5-7 at Shawnigan Lake School, with the Seycove Seyhawks scoring a 2-1 win over Rockridge Secondary to take home gold.

The provincial title is the second for the Seyhawks in the past three years, after the same team won in 2023, breaking a decades-long string of dominance for private schools in field hockey.

It is only the eighth provincial title of any kind for Seycove, a small public school with around 500 students, since the school opened in 1979.

“It means a lot coming from a little school,” said Melanie Reid, a Seycove teacher who volunteered her time while on maternity leave to coach the team alongside fellow teacher Ray Yip.

Reid and Yip don’t host tryouts for the field hockey team, as they generally don’t have enough players to fill the roster.

Seycove’s seniors team, who compete against other larger schools with entirely senior-school aged players, had numerous players as young as Grade 8 who had never played field hockey before, Reid said.

Seycove also doesn’t have its own turf field, Reid said, so the team has to practice at other schools.

The team lost a significant amount of Grade 12 players last year, Reid said, so they were unsure of how they’d fare this season against the larger schools, but she said everyone is pleasantly surprised and very excited by the victory.

“Twice in three years is quite amazing,” she said.​

​​Hilary Angus is a Vancouver-based journalist writing for the North Shore News. She can be reached at info@hilaryangus.com.​