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With Alaska, there are always questions. For me, the first question was “when do we go.” I’ve long been fascinated with the 49th state, urging my parents to take me there in high school, and dreaming of going back the day we left. I chose topics for my master’s thesis that allowed me to travel back to the state in 2004, spending a month meandering throughout the Alexander Archipelago like the peripatetic whales I spent days kayaking next to. I’ve seen the endless midnight sunlight of summer along knife-edged ridges miles above the sea and swam in the bluest glacial waters. When I die, if we get to chose, I want Alaska as my heaven. So when Elias Ulvi wrote me from from the last frontier, I knew I had to get him to contribute. It turns out he knows about Alaskan questions as well, and that is where we start our next installment of the Diary Project…

Northern Exposure

Do you live in an igloo? What currency do you use? Do you ride in dog sleds?? Is it dark year round??? These are common questions many Alaskans hear any time they travel out of state. I’ve heard them at licensing courses and team tournaments in Las Vegas, L.A., Honolulu, Denver and San Diego among other places. Of course I always have a bit of fun before telling them the truth, which too, usually surprises them.

My family did use sled dogs as a primary mode of transportation during the long, cold, dark months of Alaska’s interior winters, but that is an exception and not the norm up here, a practice that is dying out. My parents were hippie transplants from California and Oregon answering the call of the wild. They wound up at the end of the road in Eagle, Alaska, population… less than 200. We actually lived 12 miles up the Yukon River near the border of Canada. Of course we didn’t live in an igloo but, perhaps something nearly as rustic. My parents had friends in the village that allowed them to build a small log cabin on Native lands. The roof was covered with Visquene and moss, and had saplings growing out of the top, undeterred. We lived a subsistence lifestyle based largely on vegetables out of the garden canned for the harvest-less winter, fish out of the river, and wild game along with burlap bags of rice and beans bought with an annual income of less than $7000 a year.

My mom, Lynette, actually mistook a wolf for a dog off of it’s chain in the middle of the night and was close to trying to chain it up before she recognized reality. Don’t get it twisted, Northern Exposure wasn’t filmed in Alaska (it was filmed in Washington). The small towns here are more rustic and the cities more modern. This, however, was definitely Bush Alaska, the kind of setting you read about in Coming Into the Country, by John McPhee or The Final Frontiersman, by James Campbell. In actuality, you can read about my family in both of those books. My dad Steve, like many others, avoided McPhee when he came to Eagle in the Spring of 1976 to further research his ‘river rat’ stories. He was the New Yorker, the outsider. My dad was interviewed and my parents’ story included in McPhee’s book.

Eventually my family moved downriver to Eagle, where my sister Lena and I could attend school. This is where I had my first taste of soccer. It took a few hundred words for me to get to soccer, I know, but this is Alaska, few things come quick and easy.

My second grade teacher, who was also my gym teacher, introduced our class to soccer on a whim. I immediately fell in love with a game I hardly understood. My parents hired a friend’s daughter who visited Eagle every summer from Washington to teach me the game. She had played collegiate soccer and worked with me on my technical abilities when she wasn’t distracted by local guys hanging out, hoping to talk to her.

Around the time I was nine years old, my parents moved again, this time to Fairbanks, the state’s second largest city, where there were more kids our age and more recreational opportunities. For me, that meant more soccer. I began playing on arrival and continued through junior high and high school. Our high school team lost one game and tied one game in four years but, because of the sheer size of Alaska and the difficulties of playing outdoors during the school season, we never were allowed to play in the state championships.

Facilities for winter practices and league play are very difficult to come by. High school gyms are unavailable because of the sheer number of sports teams within the schools. Elementary gyms are too small for more than six kids to practice in. This leaves Middle schools to be fought over by the various soccer clubs and other sports programs. This allows for about one practice a week during the months of October through March. This doesn’t allow for much preparation for teams attending Regionals in June, coupled with the fact that the high school soccer season runs from early March to late May.

During the season, high school players can’t train with their club teams per Alaska Sports Activities Association (ASAA) policy. This gives club coaches about two weeks to get the players all back on the same page. While this is going on, all of the other Regional-bound teams from other states are reaching their peak performance levels in their State Cup competitions. Alaska’s State Cup takes place in early August, a full ten months prior to Regionals, because winter conditions make it impossible to play outdoors and there are no full-sized indoor fields. Currently Anchorage and Wasilla have indoor field turf fields about a fourth the size of an outdoor pitch. This helps with speed of play and technique but doesn’t allow for 11 v 11 tactics and teams are often split indoors to allow adequate playing time in these small sided games.

This lack of opportunity leads to somewhat drastic measures, at least by a teenager’s standards. When I was in high school, my buddies and I would show up in our gymnasium before school, at 5am to play pick-up matches with and against kids from rival schools who were also serious about developing as players. We would also play in narrow hallways after school, bruising ourselves against lockers and denting metal trash cans that we used as goals- until we were kicked out by some school official.

Playing in the local men’s league was one of the only ways to push ourselves as well, from the age of 13 on. Many of the adult teams seemed to dislike the fact that they had to chase high schoolers all over the place and were only too happy to put us on our ass any chance they could get. Young players in the Anchorage area show up to play ‘open’ soccer at 11 pm on weeknights because that is the only time the turf is open.

Elias now coaches teams such as the Falcons seen here in blue

In Alaska, these types of sacrifices are necessary to succeed in the outside, ‘real’ world of soccer. As an Alaskan team traveling to Regionals for club or ODP competition it used to be expected that we would get beat by a ton. However, as the sport has grown in the U.S., so has the success of Alaskan teams and players. During one trip to Bozeman, Montana for our Regional ODP Camp and Tournament, my Alaska 79’ boys team found quite a bit of success. We won three games that year including a shocking 1-0 defeat of South Cal, a team which I found out many years later had included Carlos Bocanegra, Steve Cherundolo and Nick Rimando. Every year, more and more players go on to play collegiate ball, and some have taken shots at playing in lower division European leagues. Alaska’s problem isn’t that there aren’t talented players, the problem is in the numbers. While teams in California may get 100 kids coming to tryouts, I am lucky if I get one quality player showing up and we are three time State Champions. If a team loses a few players to another team, it is more likely that the team will fold rather than finding more players of quality to fill the void. This is no choice.

There is one choice we had, though, that most others didn’t. The indoor team plays every two years in the Arctic Winter Games. A Winter Olympic-style competition for countries that partly lay above the Arctic Circle, these competitions pitted our Alaskan team against teams from Canada, Russia and Greenland in sports ranging from wrestling and skiing to basketball and indoor soccer. We would find success despite the fact that the population of our entire state is around only six hundred thousand.

Alaska by Numbers

Basketball and hockey have always been the state’s main team sports due to the availability of ice and gymnasiums. Over the past few years, though, soccer has dominated as the sport most participated in by youths and adults. Despite population growth in the Anchorage area, baseball has dropped from 5,173 total participants in 1999 to 3,614 in 2005, football has dropped from 2,435 in 1999 to 2,260 in 2005, hockey has dropped from 4,610 in 1999 to 4,450 in 2005, rugby has dropped from 210 in 1999 to 80 in 2005, softball has dropped from 6,302 in 1999 to 5,335 in 2005, and soccer has risen in participation from 6,776 in 1999 to 7,657 in 2005. That’s almost one thousand kids in 6 years which is a decent increase considering the size of our city.

Basketball, however, remains the unofficial state sport as every native community and small town can participate due to the small size of teams and the use of their school gyms. I’ve entertained the idea of getting out to small communities throughout the state where I could give a three day mini-camp in the school’s gymnasium. I would be able to teach the children something about the game along with giving the teacher some coaching ideas and educational material along with leaving all of the balls, discs, cones and a set of uniforms. In a state the size of Alaska, many of these communities are only accessible by small airplanes, and the cost would be immense. Soccer can be successful in rural communities if it is introduced in a way that will hook the children. It is an ideal sport for a small community to play during the long winter months where people are pent-up inside. All you need is a couple of people for small-sided games along with a ball and something that could be called a goal.

I hadn’t thought too much on the subject of Alaskan Natives playing the sport until Adam asked me about it. Really, in the big picture, there are very few. I guess I always assumed (wrongfully) that if someone wanted to play, they would at least contact an organization to explore monetary possibilities. I played along with three or four Alaskan Natives growing up in Fairbanks but, see very little at any level in Anchorage or during tournaments around the state. The Greenland team we played in the finals of the 1995 Arctic Winter Games was comprised entirely of Greenland Eskimos and they were phenomenal players. Are people trying to deter minorities from playing up here? Not that I have seen or have heard of. Anchorage is supposedly the most diverse city in the US per capita. I do have three kids of Colombian decent playing for my club team and quite a mixture of Hispanic, Asian and white players on the Dimond High School team I coach. Do I think coaches and State officials could do a better job of looking for possible players that may not emerge on their own due to financial hardship? Maybe, but even though Anchorage is the state’s biggest city, the soccer community is small enough that if someone moves into the area and has played the game they will be recruited by their future teammates at school. I think popularizing the game in the small towns and Native villages could definitely be beneficial to those kids as well as to Alaska’s future success and continuing progression in the soccer world.

The Hand You Are Dealt

We live in the Last Frontier, and just as with the western frontier more than a century ago, times are changing in Alaska. The frontier will likely not last forever, but the proud and tough people that made and make the frontier famous will survive, and that perseverance has carried over to soccer. We are no longer the whipping boys of our region and annually place players on the Regional holdover pool and in quality colleges and universities. Our alumni have become college coaches. I believe that it is only a matter of time before a graduate of Alaskan soccer is playing in MLS or even in the US MNT. As the state motto reads, North To The Future.

Lonesome Boat. Kake, Alaska.