Since 2011, the Quest Kermodes women’s basketball team has volunteered to help schlep herring around a warehouse.
No, this is not some strange training exercise — they do it each year to help raise funds for Fishermen Helping Kids with Cancer, a herring sale fundraising event in Richmond.
The sale has raised more than $550,000 since it began six years ago, according to one of the event’s organizers.
This year, the players worked the sale, hauling herring around a Richmond warehouse while eager shoppers lined up to purchase the fish, from 8 a.m. to noon on Dec. 2.
“They don’t ask for a thing, yet rain, sleet and cold and windy they always show up and outwork the rest of us with smiles and laughter, they are eudemonic, a source of happiness at the herring sale,” said one of the event’s co-ordinators, Phil Eidsvik.
The event has sold 270 tons of herring since it began.
“The Quest players wheelbarrow at least 25 per cent of the herring from the sale site to customer’s cars – sometimes a couple of soccer fields away, sometimes a kilometre or more – so they have moved 135,000 pounds of herring from the sale site to cars.”
A stipulation of the event is that all of the money raised must be spent on kids who are being treated for cancer at BC Children's Hospital, Eidsvik said.
The Kermodes started volunteering at the sale to honour Eidsvik’s daughter Nicole, a Quest student who died of cancer in 2011. She was 17-years-old.
Her sister Andrea previously played on the Kermodes.
“We all are touched and have family members or friends who have been affected by this impactful disease,” said Dany Charlery, the Kermodes’ head coach.
“We feel like we can give some of our time as student athletes, it is necessary and we make time out of schedule to go.”
