The 2015 Canada Winter Games are becoming more of a distant memory but Wayne Yule will never forget.
As president of the Prince George Table Tennis Club, he gets a reminder every time he sets up one of the 12 competition-quality tables left as a legacy of the Games, a two-week, 20-sport event which brought hundreds of Canada's best athletes to Prince George.
Those tables will be getting a workout on April 22, when the club hosts its first-ever tournament at the AimHi Prince George Association for Community Living gym at 950 Kerry St.
The Spring Fever tournament, for recreational and competitive players, starts at 9 a.m. on the 22nd with round-robin singles games, followed in the afternoon by single-knockout eliminations. A doubles round-robin tournament will follow. Players from as far away as the Okanagan have registered to play. The cost to enter is $15 per player. Entry forms are on the club's Facebook site.
"The reason that we got this tournament is because in Kamloops they've been holding a tournament there at least two decades and this year they had some problems with the city getting a venue, so we said we would put one on," said Yule.
"I built the club itself so that we would have these materials from the Winter Games - we needed an official club that was registered and I did that," he said. "(Otherwise) it was going to be sent to the next Winter Games. I had to fight for that."
Eight of the 12 tables went to Kelly Road secondary school and four remained at Duchess Park, site of the Canada Games tournament. Yule sent two of the $1,600 tables to UNBC at the Northern Sport Centre, where they are set up in the hallway at the opposite end of the front entrance and are available to all NSC users free of charge.
The legacy of the Games is not just the equipment left behind. Yule says four people involved in next week's tournament worked as volunteer officials overseeing the table tennis events at Canada Games.
Yule is among five local people trained as coaches as part of the Canada Games preparations. He's an English teacher at Kelly Road and is passing down that knowledge to his students involved in the school's table tennis club, which meets Monday and Wednesday evenings at the school.
Thursday night at Duchess Park, Yule and a group of people gathered to form a city-wide high school club, open to all students, with club matches played Thursdays at 7 p.m.
