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The Linden Christian Wings junior varsity girls have spent the ealy part of the season in the top four of the provincial AAAA/AAA rankings.

The Linden Christian Wings varsity girls’ basketball team is proving it’s not the size of the school that matters when it comes to putting a winner on the court.

The Wings have been ranked third and fourth in the first two sets of weekly AAAA/AAA rankings — an impressive accomplishment for a school with less than 300 high school students.

Athletic director Nick Janzen said it’s the highest that a Linden Christian basketball team has ever been ranked in his 20 years at the Linden Woods school.

"This is very rare," Janzen said. "We had a JV boys’ volleyball team in the top four in the city two or three years ago, but that was about it."

At an early-season tournament at the University of Manitoba, the Wings defeated Fort Richmond (currently ranked No. 8) and Lord Selkirk before losing a close final to sixth-ranked River East.

It was the highest that a AAA school had ever finished in the tournament, according to Bisons coach Pam Danis.

Janzen said the ten players on the team — an even split between Grade 9 and 10 students — and coaches Mark Kinzel and Terry Bobychuk have established themselves as one of the toughest teams to play against in the province.

"The coaches have done a great job with the girls," Janzen said. "They push them to excel and get better."

Leading the way for the Wings is Grade 10 point guard Montana Kinzel, who played for the under-15 provincial team last summer and the under-14 team the previous year. Kinzel, a Fort Garry resident and the daughter of the coach, said this year’s team is building on a solid foundation that was established last season.

"We aren’t as tall as a lot of the other teams," she said. "But we use our speed. We really like to run. Our conditioning is a lot of our game. That’s how we (get) our wins is (we) outrun other teams."

It also doesn’t hurt to have the element of surprise on your side. Kinzel said other teams don’t always know what they’re in for when taking on the Wings.

"They probably think Linden Christian is such a small school — what players can they have?" she said.

"They don’t know we have a passion for basketball. Our school loves sports, and we come out there to compete and play our hearts out."

The school runs an organized "mini-basketball" program starting in Grade 5, teaching students the fundamentals of the game. Janzen believes that — and the community centre basketball that some of the Wings have grown up playing — has served a major role in making the team competitive.

"It definitely helps," Kinzel agreed. "It helps a lot with development, so you don’t need to re-teach fundamentals in older grades."

avi.saper@canstarnews.com