Hall was the centre of the community

For more than seven decades the Sooke Community Hall has been a centre of activities in our town. While the dedicated volunteers who built the hall in 1937, the Sooke Community Association, had many purposes in mind in creating the centre, one of the most significant objectives of that day was a hall large enough for basketball.

Sooke has always been a very sports-minded community, though the focus continues to change over the years. During the 1930s, 40s and 50s, basketball was king.

As today, sports coaching was undertaken by parents and other community-minded volunteers, always seeking the best for the area’s youth. An example of a sports group 60 years ago shows men who were to play large roles in our community.

This 1952 photo shows Sooke’s Men’s Team with manager George Pimlott at the left, and coach Bill Cains on the right.

Players, left to right: Wally Butler (one of the well-known Butler Brothers logging family), Dick Cains (a son of the Cains Brothers Garage family, and developer of property at Mount Matheson), Alan Olmstead, Pete Humphries (Sooke’s RCMP Detachment member at the time), Wilf Strong (of the faming family on Church Road), Ray Pimlott (a longtime superintendent for Butlers and Pacific Logging), Ron France, and Reg Piercey (member of another Vancouver Island logging family).

Elida Peers

Historian, Sooke Region Museum