Entering his fourth year at the helm of the Laurentian Voyageurs men’s basketball team, head coach Brandon Edwards is understandably proud of the steps that have been taken in the past three years.
And while back to back playoff appearances on the strength of an even .500 record of 11-11 in both 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 is nice – along with the first playoff win for the team since 2020 – the conversation in which Edwards is immersed is far more wide ranging.
He will point with a parental-like pride to the work his players have done in each of the past two seasons running and being extremely engaged in the Greater Sudbury Basketball Association house-league system, a twice a week commitment for much of the school year.
He’s been thrilled with the growth of the “arena game”, the newly-created Sudbury Arena extravaganza that produced one of the most memorable shots in Laurentian basketball history in 2025 – and has been the genesis of critical efforts to build a link to L.U. alumnus, preparing to welcome and celebrate the players of the eighties in February of 2027.
And like any good coach, Brandon Edwards can recite statistics until the cows come home, with ease - though his starting point might well be the overall team average of 78.8% for his student-athletes last year, a group that featured no less than 12 academic all-Canadians.
This coming weekend sees yet another chapter written in this book as Laurentian University plays host to the Peter Campbell Classic beginning on Thursday, a four-team pre-season tournament that will also feature the McGill Redbirds, the Memorial University Sea-Hawks from Newfoundland and the University of Saskatchewan Huskies – a squad coached by Jamie Campbell, son of the man for whom the event is named.
With those layers to the Laurentian story front and center, Brandon Edwards will now also attest that he is extremely excited regarded the start of the 2026-2027 campaign – albeit for notably different reasons than the past two years. The combination of a relatively depleted core of eligible players in the summer of 2023 along with the need to begin to produce a reasonable level of initial competitiveness made it difficult to build around a core of young, incoming talent.
Still, the 2025-2026 Voyageurs overcame the loss of U Sport graduates Shawn Barthelemy and Kamil Dia Hantchi and the transfer of Nginyu Ngala to the Kansas Jayhawks of the NCAA to equal their W/L record of the previous year. A little more turnover and another recruiting class that Edwards can call his own has a younger than the previous editions L.U. crew changing things up this fall for the native of the Ottawa region who came to Laurentian following four years with the Brock Badgers as a lead assistant coach.
“Knowing what we had this year, I recognized the need to be a little more patient than maybe we had been in the past,” said Edwards. “Given the youth that we now have, I owe it to them to be patient.” In many ways, however, this is journey the head coach both desires and cherishes.
“Even last year, I found myself wanting to teach and develop and build more than wanting to have immediate results,” he said. “I’m excited about that. They are so wide-eyed and open.”
The injection of “youthful optimism and energy”, as he termed it, will be greeted with the expected continued growth of second team all-star Brice Fandio, now in year three, as well as fourth year rebounding specialist Ismael Kanate.
“Brice is one of the most versatile players in the country,” noted Edwards, his 6’1” guard from France having finished top five in league scoring and second in assists in 2025-2026. “He runs our offense; he’s the fuel for our team.”
In terms of incoming talent to follow, Edwards has high hopes for all that he has welcomed, but noted the immediate potential for recruits Jack Noonan (son of former national champion Brendan Noonan), Hart Kreter (6’6” guard for Vancouver who suited up for the U17 British Columbia team at nationals) and Suber Bakal, who transfers in after averaging more than 20 points per game for the La Cité Coyotes (OCAA) last winter.
Yes, the on-court talent should be fun to watch – and Edwards is certainly not oblivious to the fact that coaching in any sport is a results-based endeavour – but trying to steer our conversation closer to wins and losses have proven at least a tad unproductive. The fixation for this coach will remain on the process – and specifically the environment in which said process can be productive.
“What I learned over the first three years was that we had to become competitive, certainly, but that my real desire was to build it from the group up and to develop a culture and then go and recruit to that culture,” said Edwards. “I think successful programs need to be built around recruiting people who align with the culture.”
“Once that culture is built, you can see those people flourish.”
Having grown up in the backyard of the U Sport men’s basketball program that remains the envy of every other institution in the country, Edwards absorbed a great deal watching the development of a Carleton Ravens juggernaut that has laid claim to 18 national championships in the past 23 years – and enter the 2026-2027 campaign as defending champs.
“It’s all about establishing a baseline of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, both on and off the court,” said Edwards. “The Ravens know who they are. They have proven that there is a recipe that works if you are willing to hold people accountable to a standard.”
Coming off a season in which the Voyageurs swept the home and home season series from Carleton for the first time in at least two decades, Brandon Edwards is encouraged with what is being built in Sudbury.
“I think winning can happen anywhere. I truly believe that in my heart.”
