NV Junior Native Hockey Tournament is back

Marius Auer NEWSROOM@MERRITTHERALD.COM

The Nicola Valley Junior Native Hockey Tournament made its triumphant post-pandemic restriction return last weekend, drawing in hundreds of B.C. players and parents across 20 teams for a weekend of competitive hockey action.

The annual tournament has taken place for 33 years, with the exception of the past three, and provides a space of young Indigenous athletes to engage with the sport of hockey in a competitive and fun way, an opportunity that organizers said has been hard to access in the past and the present.

“I’m quite a hardliner on the fact that society has ignored us for a long time, so there was no diversity or inclusion,” noted Bill Bose,