The Spartans beat their city rivals Christ’s College, 94-81, in the final at Palmerston North last Saturday, overturning a 68-59 deficit late in the third quarter to roar to victory.
Head coach Fraser Costley has been instrumental in the team’s success, coaching eight members of the 10-man squad since they were in year 9 five years ago, including his son Kobe.
“They’ve grown together, they’ve put in the work, and it’s a special moment,” he said.
"To have that core group of dudes for all those years, I think it just goes beyond basketball. It's such a good life lesson in terms of the work and then what you can get out of it if you just put your mind to it.”
Costley said he knew his team had the quality to be one of the best in the country after winning the Canterbury and South Island competitions this year.
“You’ve got to go in with an ultimate goal and then break it down to little day-by-day goals to keep the boys focused.
“We put huge focus on our first game of the tournament, we've got to start the right way, we can't put ourselves in a hole. Then we've got to look at how the rest of the draw looks, so the next job is we want to top our pool, because if you've got top spot then you had a game off before quarter-finals, and that was quite critical to earn ourselves that rest, which is critical in a long tournament.”
Costley said the win meant a lot, as he was a former Shirley student who also played in the basketball team.
"There's a lot of history, and I've had so many former players from my playing days and then throughout the last 25 years that have all played there and are sharing a bit of it, and they're all reaching out. The support on that side of things has been amazing.
"(At the start of the season) we had this goal of, at the very least, qualifying for nationals and finishing with a national ranking. I don't know if we ever kind of thought deep down that we'd win it all, but as the season wore on, we started to see that it was a possibility.
"It’s incredibly special for these boys.”
