2026 FRED HESLOP AWARD - LARISSA LAPIERRE

It was 15 years ago that a friend of Larissa Lapierre’s came up with the idea to join the board of their local minor hockey association, based in the Tri-Cities area of Vancouver which incorporates Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, and Port Moody.

Lapierre eventually became president of the Tri-Cities Female Hockey Association and has since moved on to become the vice-president of the Pacific Coast Amateur Hockey Association (PCAHA), which incorporates upwards of 20,000 players in the Greater Vancouver area.

“It was a good group behind me taking over [at Tri-Cities], and then I got recruited into Pacific Coast after that. I had known a lot of the people there just from my time as president, and I was into other sports as well. Sports was kind of our plan to keep the kids out of trouble, which has worked so far,” she said.

Lapierre’s contributions have not gone unnoticed, as she is one of a handful of the 2026 winners of BC Hockey’s Fred Heslop Awards, which honours members who have given outstanding service and who have devoted a volunteer effort and service to a minor hockey program in British Columbia and Yukon.

“I know the female side a little bit more than the integrated side, but this year, specifically, I've been spending more time on what I'm going to call special projects; things to move our game forward,” Lapierre said.

“Sometimes, we forget about moving the ball forward a little bit or doing something different,” Lapierre explained. “Change with the changing times, changing parents and kids.

“So, I've been spending lots of time this year on the kind of things that we want to change or things that we want to do new, or pilot projects that we're trying out, which has been pretty rewarding. Maybe a little bit more so than just rinse and repeat with getting kids on the ice, which is obviously important. But it's a little bit more of what I was kind of interested in doing.”

So, what began as a stint with Tri-Cities Female Hockey Association, while her daughter Gillian played, has blossomed into so much more.

“Pacific Coast has been around for a very long time and we've grown a lot, pushing 20,000 kids now playing hockey. We haven't stopped to think, ‘Hey, do we need to communicate differently or do we need to do this differently or that differently?’” said Lapierre.

“So those are also some of the things - more from the office perspective - that we're trying to just modernize a little.”

Lapierre is a little unique in that her children are no longer involved with hockey.

“It’s a different perspective,” she said. “It’s arguably a little bit easier because there is no conflict with, ‘Oh, you're doing this for your kid or this is your kid's team,’ or any of that. So it's interesting and the time has gone way too fast, obviously.

“I didn't play any of the sports that my kids ended up playing. So really the only way I could contribute was sort of through the administrative side of it. Back when my daughter that played hockey was five or six, a friend on one of her teams was like, ‘Hey, let's join the board and see what's going on.’ The rest, literally, is history.”