They have delivered in the classroom and on the basketball court.
And graduating basketball players Cassandra Powell and Vitali Khakholka displayed their wealth of talent in other ways - with a bit of swagger and some inspiration.
They both did something out of the ordinary before playing their final Ontario Colleges Athletic Association regular season home games. For Powell, it was singing while Khakolka went to the electric guitar.
Powell, from Calgary and graduating from the Nursing Program this year, sang the Canadian National Anthem after the women's game and just before the men tipped off on Saturday against Algonquin.
Khakholka, from Belarus, also chose "Oh Canada" but rather than sing, he used his seven-string electric guitar to stimulate the crowd before the men's game on Sunday against La Cite.
Both, when asked by men's head coach Jonathan Smith to do something memorable in their OCAA home season finale, accepted the challenge.
"(Smith) heard me singing one day on a bus trip home from a game and I guess he liked my voice," said Powell, who along with teammates Aria Charles, Olga Filimonova and Shan Wilson received flowers at halftime of their game.
"I love to sing and it was my first time at a College game."
Powell, who has an academic placement at the Trillium Health Centre, said she had practiced in front of elderly patients who also liked her voice.
She's been a teacher, a tutor, a babysitter, a singer, an academic, a dancer, an athlete and now wants to be a nurse to help people, whose intellectual and social skills could create difficult times in life.
Khakholka, the tallest on the Huskies men's team at 6-foot-7, is in the postgraduate Human Resources Program,
With a Bachelor of Arts degree from Minsk State Linguistic University and a Masters Degree from Schiller International University in Largo, Fla., that's fairly impressive. He also communicates in five languages and went to a musical school in his homeland.
As for the guitar playing, Jimi Hendrix may have been impressed.
"I was a bit nervous, a few bars were a bit off but I just kept playing," said Khakholka, who has played in a band and had very little time to rehearse when his coach invited him to play as a farewell gesture. “The coach asked, I said OK and it was fun."
Khakholka, Evan Clavir and Vadim Halimov are the only three on the men's team who will graduate this year. - DG
