It’s a holiday tradition in Kamloops, the Kamloops International Bantam Ice Hockey Tournament.

The tournament gets underway across the tournament capital on Friday, December 15th and runs through 19th. Organizers says there will be 41 teams coming pack our arenas.

Bob Dever is one of the tournament’s directors, and he tells Radio NL there are teams are coming from all over the place in 2023.

“We’ve got a lot of teams coming in from across B.C. We’ve got good, good selection from Alberta. We got one team coming from Saskatchewan, and some from Washington State and then the longest travel team is going to be an academy from Transylvania from Romania,” Dever said.

“So they’re they’re arriving on late at night on the 12th and then they head out of town the night the tournament wraps up on the 19th.”

Another first for KIBIHT this year is the addition of a girls division.

“It’s been fantastic,” said Dever. “The people around just around Kamloops even are so excited to see. See the female division start up and I think the local team is going to have a really good showing.

The call for volunteers never stops either as it takes a village to put on such a huge event like this.

“It’s a massive weekend a massive undertaking and you need people to help put it all together,” he said. “We do we I mean it’s a full it’s a full five days.”

“We’re going to have need for people to run the score clock and the tablet or the game sheet on the tablet. We’re actually paying people this year to do it. So you get $25 A game to do it. We can’t offer it to people who have zero experience with those with working the clock or the tablet. So we need people that got have done it before past it’s just it would be too too tough to train somebody on the spot you know, during a five minute warm up here.”

If you have any interest in volunteering you can get in touch with organizers via email at kibihtvolunteer@gmail.com