Hello Vancouver Basketball Community
My name is Conor Morgan and I am a fifth-year forward on the UBC Thunderbirds Varsity Basketball Team. I am originally from Victoria, where I was born and raised and am now entering the final weeks of my eligibility at UBC and thought I would reflect on the past six years and give an update on how our team is doing to date.
As I said I am a Victoria, BC native and have grown up on the West Coast and spent my entire life out this way. I originally started playing basketball when I was in about Grade 6 and really started to take it seriously by the time Grade 9 came around. I ended up graduating from Mount Douglas High School, which is more known as a football school, but I like to think that it was know for both basketball and football in my time there.
Moving into post-secondary, I decided to commit to UBC and join forces with Kevin Hanson, Vern Knopp, Spencer Mckay and Dahman Boudraa as it would give me a chance to get away from home and teach me how to grow up. In my first year at UBC I met Jordan Jensen-Whyte and Isaiah Solomon, who to this day are very good friends of mine and people I keep in touch with on the regular. Being the only three rookies on the team we bonded and grinded through the year and ended up helping our veterans (Doug Plumb, Tommy Nixon, and Dave Wagner) bring home a CanadaWest title to the program. In my second year at UBC I was injured and sat out the year as a medical redshirt in order to save my year of eligibility.
Fast forward to today and I am in my sixth-year of school working towards a Master’s Degree with an entirely new team, as you can imagine. Myself, Phil Jalalpoor and Luka Zaharijevic are now the veteran players in our last years and the tables have turned, as we are now old heads who our younger teammates are coming to advice for. Overall our team this year is a combination of young and old and we have come together very well. The lack of time that we have spent playing together does not mean much or affect us due to the quality of people and dedication that we have in our change room. To put it in perspective we have nine guys on our team who are in either their first or second years (A couple of them are redshirts but you get the picture). We have two guys in their third year (Taylor Browne and Roger Milne) and one guy in his fourth (Patrick Simon).
We are headed into the last weekend of the season and it is an emotional one as it is against my hometown team, the University of Victoria Vikes and it is Senior’s Night at War Memorial Gym. To think that it will be the last regular season game is a crazy thought - it feels like just yesterday I was eating at my first year residence rocking really bad haircut.
Looking back and giving perspective to my choice to come to UBC, it is pretty interesting that even as a kid, 18 years old, and fresh out of high school, I could not have made a better choice. That being said, everyone has their ups and downs but if you really want it bad enough these ups and downs will be moderated with a hardhat mentality. The people that have come into my life in my six years here have been unreal and I would do it all over again if I could.
Thanks for reading and hope to connect again soon!
Cheers,
Conor
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Thanks, Conor for contributing a journal to Vancouver Basketball. We look forward to your continued growth as a person and a player.
If you want to watch Conor and the UBC Thunderbirds in their last regular season home game you can buy tickets to the UBC Courtside game this Friday February 2nd.
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