N.S. junior high kids raise money for Bathurst High

Junior high school students in Truro, N.S., played a friendly game of basketball Wednesday to raise money for a New Brunswick high school that lost seven of its students earlier this month.

The 13 members of the Central Colchester Junior High basketball team played an exhibition game against teachers and community leaders to pay tribute to the seven Bathurst High School ball players killed in a highway crash earlier this month.

Members of the Halifax Rainmen professional basketball team, part of the Northeast Division of the Blue Conference in the American Basketball Association, attended the event, coaching the teenagers and refereeing the game.

Central Colchester's gymnasium was packed with the school's 500 students, many of whom wore red as a tribute to the players from Bathurst, N.B., whose team colours were red and black. The loudest cheers during the game went up for the students' team, which defeated their elders by a score of 43 to 36.

Donations were collected in memory of the "Boys in Red" and will be given to the student council at Bathurst High.

"We hope the proceeds of this event will help them keep basketball alive in their school," Louise Wirtanen, principal at Central Colchester, said in a release.

"We will donate the game ball, among other mementos, to the team and will send the proceeds to the Bathurst High School student council for them to spend as they see fit."

The Bathurst High School boys' basketball team, the Phantoms, was returning from a game in Moncton, N.B., about 220 kilometres to the south, when their van fish-tailed on a slippery highway and collided with a truck driving in the opposite lane, police said. The team coach's wife,a teacher, was also killed in the crash.