Matt Altizer was passionate about tennis.
If not for our cool climate, he would have played the game 366 days of the year.
In his job as systems manager at The Citizen he was a perfectionist, a wizard at fixing computer problems, and he used that same ingenuity to design and construct a portable net that allowed him to play tennis indoors.
Less than a week before Altizer and his wife Leah, their children Jonathan, 14 and Emily, 12, and Altizer's sister Heather Kress were killed Thursday in a highway accident north of McLeese Lake, Altizer spoke to Citizen sports reporter Sheri Lamb about his efforts to play tennis indoors at the Northern Sport Centre.
"The tennis season in Prince George is only about six months long. It leaves six months of dreaming about tennis," said Altizer.
That dream became more of a reality once the Northern Sport Centre opened in 2007. The new indoor fieldhouse at UNBC opened the door for Altizer to move from cramped high school gymnasiums to a spacious fieldhouse, where he could finally start organizing indoor games and hitting practices on the springy Fieldturf surface.
"I call it turf tennis because it's not like anything else," Altizer said.
"It's a really low bounce and it's hard to predict, you get a different bounce all the time. The soccer turf I like to play on is better than the gymnasium floors because the ball skids too much."
Altizer started setting up benches at the fieldhouse court to act as nets until two years ago when he came up with idea to build his own portable net.
"I designed it on the computer," he said. "Ordered the net from a company in England because it had to be a special lightweight net that was a full 42-foot length. I just had it welded up so you can just assemble it and hold it in two different bags - a hockey bag and a snowboard bag.
Sport Centre staff allowed Altizer to store the net in an unoccupied room. He used the website sportmeets.ca to help set up a schedule for players interested in taking part in the indoor matches.
"It's pretty much the same guys that show up every week," Altizer said. "I don't know if anybody's into it as much as me because who else would build their own net."
While club membership remained small, that didn't curb Altizer's enthusiasm for the tennis.
He was always one of the first to arrive in spring with his shovel to clear snow off the courts and he'd always stretch the season into the fall as long as the weather held. He played in out-of-town tournaments in Kamloops and Salmon Arm and helped organize the Prince George Open and City Championships.
But it was always a struggle filling those competition ladders.
"It's a challenge to find good competitive players here in Prince George," he said. "There's not a lot of interest it seems. I think there's a big generation gap as it used to be very popular in the '70s' and '80s and then it kind of died off and no young people got into it. A lot of those people now feel they're too old to play competitive tennis so you don't see them too often.
"I am 40, with hopefully lots more years left."
Altizer was one of the city's top players and teamed up with club pro Andriy Vdovenko to beat Jim Condon and Kristian Kiland in the 2011 Prince George Open doubles semifinal. Condon was a close friend of Altizer's, having endured many epic singles battles with him on the court.
"He was very determined, we were closely matched and we always had long frustrating matches against each other," said Condon.
"He was always one of the nicest tennis players and he was the quickest player in Prince George. He didn't weigh that much and he was in great shape. It was always frustrating because you couldn't finish him off with a shot you normally could."
Condon briefly coached Altizer's son Jonathan and daughter Emily in tennis.
"Emily liked it better than Jon did," said Condon. "Jon had his own style and got the ball back any way he could but he was quick and ran everything down. Emily was more technically gifted and wanted to learn tennis more and took more lessons."
Eventually, Altizer took over coaching his kids at the club once in while, and he had Jon playing squash at the NSC. Quiet on the court, Altizer's sense of humour made for some memorable moments for former PGTC president Nancy Condon.
"He never would say a lot, but all of sudden he'd say something and you'd be doubled over laughing," she said.
"I remember him running so hard for a shot one time and he got it and was out of position for the next shot and I heard him say, 'Help me.' That's something we all say now when we're bent out of position."
In late January, a hacker destroyed the PGTC website www.pgtennis.ca, which Altizer had built. He had just started trying to repair it when the accident happened. At the time of his death, Altizer and his family were travelling to Vancouver, where he had tickets to watch the Davis Cup professional tennis team match between Canada and France. He had planned on staying with his older brother Tim, who lived in Langley.
It would have been Altizer's first live pro tennis event. Organizers of the Davis Cup event observed a moment of silence in memory of the Altizer family before the opening match Friday in Vancouver.
The PGTC is in the process of looking for a permanent indoor facility and Nancy Condon said, if that happens, there a good chance Altizer will have his name attached to those courts.
"He was probably one of the greatest ambassadors for tennis," said Jim Condon.
"He helped out any way he could and he didn't ask for anything in return. He just wanted tennis to grow."
