Swimming Facilities

Provincial Swimming Championships running smoothly

Aug 12, 2025 | 5:03 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The Prince George Aquatic centre is playing host to the 67th annual provincial swimming championships and with that comes a lot of logistics and maneuvering. With approximately 6000 people set to visit the centre over the course of the week Aquatics Manager Jim Worthington says the venue is constantly changing to meet the demands of each individual event and the spectators watching it.

“We actually have to map out day by day the events that are happening because we have to change the configured configurations. Yesterday was diving and today and tomorrow is water polo so we’re always moving our bulkheads changing the configuration of the set up of the pool. Speed swimming is our biggest event right happening Friday through Sunday and there’s a lot of electronics that comes in place for the speed swimming event. So we have a tech on site from Vancouver who helps manage the Swiss timing equipment to make sure everything is running smoothly.” said Worthington.

The venue also features food trucks, merchandise sales and soon a tent city which will house swimmers and their respective teams during the weekend. BCSSA President Jim Baxter says a lot went into preparing Prince George to host their first championships since 2007.

“It’s an incredible amount of organization. Our office manager and director of competition have been working for 15 months getting this organized. They made two trips up to Prince George. We have eight regions in the BCS and all the directors from those regions, they have duties. Part of those duties consisted of bringing up all the gear we shipped. It was probably about 1,500 pounds of equipment and then people that were driving up brought up the other stuff that we couldn’t get into the truck to ship up here. ” said Baxter.

With speed swimming scheduled for Friday the wave pool has been emptied and crews are working evenings to set up extra stands to accomodate the expected large crowds this coming weekend.