"Hey, we're the Alaska Heat."

February 7, 2020 7:47 PM

"Don’t call them the Glennallen Panthers. Or the Tok Wolverines, or the Barrow Whalers. They are the Alaska Heat, and while every kid on the team has an allegiance to one of those schools, they gladly put aside school pride in order to play high school hockey."

It not unusual for rural schools in Alaska to combine to create sports teams, but the geographic area between the three schools is something else: Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow) is 320 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Tok is 93 miles from the Canadian border, and Glenallen is practically urban, a mere 170 miles from Anchorage.

Utqiagvik previously

posted by vespabelle (5 comments total)

So they are okay with long breakout passes, then?

Also back checking all the way to “home plate.”
posted by notyou at 9:22 PM on February 7, 2020

The more useful description of the distances between the schools is in the paragraph preceding the pullquote:

Glennallen and Tok are about 140 miles apart, and Utqiagvik is hundreds of miles away -- a 500-mile plane ride to Fairbanks, usually followed by either a 250-mile drive to Glennallen or a 200-mile drive to Tok.

That's insane.


For not-really-very-relevant reference, my daughter's HS gymnastics team includes three suburban towns. Last year, it was only two. The two outlying schools are 16 miles apart. It's a pretty large team, but the third school only supplied one active athlete. (A lot of the girls don't actually compete.) High-school gymnastics has been losing popularity for years; the state athletic association was about to decertify the sport, saying they couldn't justify the expense of maintaining the rulebooks, until USGA said the state association could use theirs. As it is, there are no boys' gymnastic competitions. The few boys who compete do it at girls' meets.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:25 AM on February 8, 2020

We're not as rural as Alaska or some of the other western states but coops have long been a way of life for small schools in North Dakota. Our football players coop with a team almost 50 miles away, the wrestlers go to one 13 miles away, and the girls gymnastic club travels ridiculous miles to find meets. The kids take it well because they want to compete and they're a lot hardier and have WAY more energy than their adult handlers/coaches.
posted by Ber at 8:39 AM on February 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

My father grew up in Devil's Lake, ND and went to a Catholic high school there, since closed. His graduating class was seven people. The school still found a way to field a seven-man football team, and a basketball team. Games could be 250 miles/400 km away, with transportation via a school bus. He recalls crawling onto the bus after one beat-down and lying on the floor in the back, in pain, for the eight hour ride back home.
posted by blob at 3:04 PM on February 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

When I covered high school sports for a weekly newspaper in an Eastern Washington wheat town (where many schools are small and many games have travel distances of 50 or 60 miles, not that big a deal), I heard a possibly apocryphal story of a Texas high school coach who took a new job at a Seattle area high school. He was extremely upset about the diminutive size of his travel budget until he took a moment to realize where he was.
posted by lhauser at 5:40 PM on February 8, 2020