Lyndon Cross was a dedicated social worker here in Campbell River until he was taken from the community and his family by cancer.
He wanted his life to be about making a positive difference in the world, and his brother and sister-in-law decided that his death should do the same.
So with the help of volunteers from around the Campbell River Slowpitch League – many of whom played with Cross and his brother before his death – they decided to put on a fundraising tournament in support of a bursary to North Island College for someone from the foster care system or wants to enroll in the Social Services Diploma Program.
“We used to have two tournaments in town,” says Kristie Cross, Lyndon’s sister-in-law. “There was the league tournament and a SIDS tournament, and then the SIDS tournament turned into Cameryn’s Cause, which ran for about seven years or so. But the year that they stopped, Brent (Lyndon’s brother, her husband) said, ‘why don’t we do one in Lyndon’s memory?’”
Brent and Lyndon, Kristie says, “didn’t make too many friends on the ball field when they played together. They were highly competitive,” but that didn’t keep their on-field foes from stepping up to the plate to help.
“It’s been really amazing to see that even people who are really competitive with each other on the field and would probably never be friends otherwise come together for this,” Kristie says. “Slowpitch has really become a family for us and we know that we’ll see the same faces around the raffle table each year and we look forward to it.”
Initially, they thought the tournament would be a one-off.
“We just thought we’d do one and see how it went, and here we are 10 years later and it’s still going,” Kristie says. “It’s amazing. Every year, we just get more and more people telling us we have to keep doing it.”
The popularity of the tournament – between 17 and 24 teams register every year – means that they have a bunch of extra money on top of their annual NIC scholarship.
That excess money has been going to the Campbell River Hospital Foundation to help them purchase much-needed equipment for the Campbell River Hospital.
They knew that money would be put to good use. They couldn’t have ever expected, however, what happened this past winter.
When Brent and Kristie’s 13-year-old son blocked a shot in a hockey game, “just being a good, dedicated defenceman,” Kristie says, “he complained for a couple of days, but everyone thought it was just the bruising that was bothering him.”
But they got an urgent call from his school a few days later. They needed to come get him to the hospital.
The portable ultrasound machine that the 2015 tournament helped purchase for the Emergency Room found their son’s internal bleeding and ruptured spleen. He was airlifted to Victoria, where surgery was performed to get him fixed up. The doctor with whom they posed for the donation photo two years earlier was on their case that night.
“It’s hard to describe how it felt to see the machine we helped purchase used on our own son.”
This year, the tournament saw 22 teams take over the fields of Willow Point Park, and it was another great success, Kristie says.