By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
The tight-knit group that is the Kamloops Blazers’ off-ice officials lost a friend Monday morning when Jim Hill died at the age of 70.
Hill, a volunteer with the WHL team since 1990, had been dealing with a heart condition and was scheduled for surgery on Friday.
Dan Cournoyea, who supervises the off-ice officials, said Tuesday that Hill was awaiting surgery.
“He had gone to Vancouver a couple of times and everything was scheduled,” Cournoyea said. “I talked to him last week. He was excited . . . he told me his surgery was upcoming. It was a lot less serious than he was first led to believe.”
Hill first volunteered with the Blazers in 1990, starting out as an usher at Memorial Arena.
The Blazers moved to their new home in Riverside Coliseum in 1992 and Hill switched to security, working by the Blazers’ bench. For the last eight seasons, he was located in the penalty box as a timekeeper.
With the off-ice officials, Hill dealt with a lot of the scheduling.
“He really liked doing it and really wanted to do it,” said Cournoyea, who had known Hill since 1998. “He enjoyed doing it.”
Hill was, Cournoyea said, “absolutely . . . absolutely” a good guy.
If you are a regular at Blazers games, you will recall Hill from his role in various video shorts that were shown on the scoreclock, all of them poking fun at visiting teams.
Two years ago, Fred Nicolson, who headed up the off-ice officials, lost a battle with cancer. Like Hill, Nicolson was 70 when he died.
Hill is survived by his wife, Noreen, daughters Lucy and Kathy, and sons Tom and Bob, along with 12 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
At Hill’s request, there won’t be a funeral; however, a celebration of Hill’s life, in the form of an open house and barbecue, is scheduled to be held on Friday.
The obituary that appears in the Kamloops Daily News today is right here.


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Kamloops sports world loses a friend

FRED NICOLSON

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor

The Kamloops sporting community has lost a friend with the death of Fred Nicolson.
Nicolson, 70, passed away Tuesday at Royal Inland Hospital after a brief battle with cancer.
Nicolson was an especially familiar face at Kamloops Blazers’ games and on baseball, fastball and slo-pitch diamonds around the city.
“I met Fred at fastball,” long-time friend Dan Cournoyea said Tuesday. “I had moved up from the coast and was an umpire. He’s one of the guys who I met first and we got talking and he invited me to be one of the crew for hockey.”
Nicolson headed up the the WHL team’s off-ice officials crew. In fact, he spent 39 years as a volunteer with the Chiefs, Jr. Oilers and Blazers. Nicholson also was a long-time member of the Kamloops Blazers Booster Club, an organization he once served as president.
Nicolson worked on the off-ice officiating crew at the 1995 Memorial Cup in Kamloops, the 2006 World Junior Championship that was held in Vancouver, Kamloops and Kelowna, and was especially proud to have been involved in the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver.
“That was one of his goals,” said Cournoyea, who was mainly responsible for getting volunteers off the Kamloops crew onto Olympic assignments. “He had never done one. The things he’s done for us . . . I wanted him to be able to do something he wanted to do.”
In recent summers, Nicolson kept busy in the slo-pitch community — if there was a tournament on, you could bet that Nicolson was busy as an umpire.
Spike Wallace, the Blazers’ community and sponsorship co-ordinator, wrote about Nicolson in Booster Banter, the Booster Club’s newsletter that went out to members yesterday.
“We all enjoy and appreciate Fred’s humour and caring demeanour as a proud and valuable member and past-president of the Blazers Booster Club,” Wallace wrote. “As an umpire, many a ball player . . . felt the ‘respectful’ wrath of Fred as he threw them out on strikes or on the bases, due only to unskilled base running!”
Unfortunately, Nicolson won’t have seen the newsletter, which also carried in it kind words from Howard Brown, the club’s president.
“I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Fred,” Cournoyea said. “He was involved in the community. He was very communited oriented. He put others ahead of himself.”
Earlier this month, Cournoyea and a few other friends arranged for an evening with Nicolson to be held at the Sports Action Lounge.
“He was taken aback . . . he had his emotional moments,” Cournoyea said. “You could see he was overwhelmed.”
Many of the people there that evening knew Nicolson threw his involvement with hockey.
“He’d been involved with the Blazers for 39 years,” Cournoyea said. “He wanted to do one more game next season to make it 40.”

gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
     
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