Local Sports

Soccer season ends this weekend for both UNBC teams.

Home ice has not been kind to the Spruce Kings. Not that they've had many games this B.C. Hockey League season to take advantage of the comforts of the Coliseum. Ten of their first 15 games were played in hostile territory.

Citizen staff The Kelowna Rockets picked up where they left off last weekend and put another dent in the pride of the Prince George Cougars. They scored three unanswered goals and defeated the Cats 5-2 Friday night in Kelowna.

For the first time this season, the Prince George Cougars have a winning record. For that, they have a couple of castoffs to thank.

Prince George might be the capital of northern B.C., but it's a tiny town compared to Corey Hoffman's home in Long Island, N.Y. He's from Syosset, close enough to New York City to see the long shadows cast by Manhattan skyscrapers.

The D.P. Todd Trojans were the highest-placing local team at the KSS Best of the West senior boys volleyball tournament, held in Kelowna last weekend.

VANCOUVER -- If you ask Brandon Deschamps to describe himself, the young man wearing No. 33 and lining up in the offensive backfield of the UBC Thunderbirds will keep it dead simple. "I'm just a Prince George guy out there banging," he likes to say.

With the closest team in their division being an eight-hour drive away, the Spruce Kings are all too familiar with their bus.

John Kazakoff will best be remembered in the sports community for his three decades of teaching the game of baseball to Prince George kids. As much as he loved baseball, Kazakoff spent a good chunk of his life trying to improve his own golf game.

When he's looking back at his WHL career at the end of this season, Prince George goalie Mack Shields will be smiling when he thinks about what he did to his former Calgary Hitmen teammates when they paid a two-game visit to CN Centre.