In Alaska, Trips to Games Are Complicated and Costly : Prep basketball: Teams don’t just hop on a bus and then return home the same night. A 16 1/2-hour voyage each way on a ferryboat is commonplace.
It’s midnight. Pitch dark outside. Snowing. Wind howling. Heavy seas. Windows on the bridge of the ship are frosted with a coat of ice except two heated ones directly in front of the helmsman.
Capt. John Larsen, 44, never takes his eyes off the radar screen in a particularly tricky section of Sitka narrows between Partofshikof and Kruzof islands.
Nearly all 178 passengers are asleep, in airliner chairs or curled up in sleeping bags on decks. There are no staterooms on the 235-foot Alaska State Marine Highway ferryboat Le Conte.
Forty passengers are students at Sitka High School, members of the freshman, junior varsity and varsity boys’ basketball teams accompanied by their coaches. Seven girls and seven boys are from Skagway High School, the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams. Their coaches are here too.
It’s high school basketball season in Southeast Alaska and there’s nothing quite like it anywhere else in America.
“Our kids don’t hop on a bus, play their game, get back on the bus and go home the same night like they do in the Lower 48,” said John Bisson, 39, varsity coach of the Sitka Wolves.
“We can’t drive from one town to the next in this part of the world. We live in tiny villages and small towns on remote islands. We either fly and spend a small fortune to go to another school to play (the weather is so bad in winter, half the time the planes are grounded), take the state-operated ferryboats or a combination of both.”
Sitka High School’s three boys’ basketball teams were on a short trip to Juneau. They would be away from home from 10 p.m. Thursday to late Sunday night, with each team playing two games against the Juneau-Douglas High School teams Friday and Saturday. They would miss only one day of school. It would be a 16 1/2-hour voyage each way on the ferryboat.
It was a different story, however, with the Skagway teams. They were on a weeklong trip, each team playing four games. Skagway High is a small school, only 39 students. Sitka High has 430 students.
The Skagway Panthers left home on a Sunday midnight ferry that arrived in Petersburg at 5 p.m. Monday. They stayed overnight in four hotel rooms.
“The three of us adults slept on the floor so the players would get a good night’s sleep to be at peak performance,” said Linda Calver, 42, home economics teacher and school librarian who came along to help chaperon the players.
On Tuesday the teams, coaches and Calver flew in three bush planes on 30-minute flights to Kake on Kupreanof Island. The boys’ and girls’ teams played the Kake teams twice, on Tuesday and Wednesday. They left Kake at 11:15 in the morning aboard the Le Conte via Sitka due to arrive at Angoon at 3:15 a.m. Friday for games scheduled that night and Saturday. They would arrive home at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, seven days after the start of their trip.
Skagway’s coaches are Doug Struthers, 30, and his wife, Rhonda, 28. Doug’s team had had a miserable year at that point, no wins and 10 losses. Rhonda’s girls had won eight and lost two.
“Poor Doug,” lamented his wife. “His players lack experience. Andrew Knorr, the only male senior in school, never played basketball until this season. Four of my girls have been playing three years.”
The Kake and Skagway girls played a game that almost defies belief.
Regulation time ended in a 56-56 tie. Then two of the Panthers fouled out in a three-minute overtime period and senior Stephanie Selmer, 17, who hadn’t been feeling well, threw up. That left four Skagway players in the game.
Even so, Skagway managed to stay competitive and the overtime ended in another tie, 64-64. But in the second three-minute overtime, another Skagway girl fouled out. That left three against five and Kake finally won, 72-68.
The trip was costing Skagway High $2,878 in travel expenses.
“Cheap trip,” allowed Doug Struthers. “Our last trip was all by air, to Hoonah and Yakutat. It cost $5,747. Annual travel budget for our students is $75,000.”
Skagway’s wrestling, track and cross-country teams also travel great distances by ship and plane as do non-athletic participants in forensics, music, and other activities.
Every day away, Skagway students had lessons taught to them by their coaches and Calver.
“People in the Lower 48 really can’t relate to what we’re doing up here,” said Bob Potrzuski, 35, who coaches the Sitka junior varsity. “The way we travel, the time we spend on the road, how our kids stay at homes of kids they play against.”
Sometimes the teams bed down in gymnasiums when they’re on the road but usually they stay overnight at their opponents’ homes. Scott Harmon, a 17-year-old Sitka High junior explained how it works.
“We’re playing Juneau-Douglas on this trip. Every time we go to Juneau, I stay at Paul Fritterer’s house. When I was a freshman on my first basketball trip to Juneau, Paul picked my name at random. I have been staying with him ever since. And every time Juneau’s basketball team plays in Sitka, he stays at my house.
“He knows my parents. I know his parents. Our parents have never met. We’re the same age. He plays forward, I play forward. We play really rough against each other. I feel like slugging him. He feels like slugging me. After each game we tell one another we’re sorry for playing so aggressively but that’s what the game is all about.”
And after playing, they go home together.
“The person who loses doesn’t talk too much,” Harmon said, laughing. “The person who wins wants to talk.”
Ted Howard, 41, coach of Sitka’s freshman team, told how the school raises money for travel.
“Every way possible,” he said. “Cake sales, pancake breakfasts, carnivals, raffles, selling out the gym on game nights to local businessmen. This time of the year, with little sunshine, gloomy weather in isolated Alaska villages and towns, high school basketball is the biggest show in town. The only show in town.”
Varsity Coach John Bisson, a high school coach for 16 years in Southeast Alaska, said: “All the coaches can rattle off hair-raising stories about rough seas on the ferryboats, flying on small planes through 80 m.p.h. head winds, flying in blizzards, in zero-visibility fog in mountain passes.”
Weather disrupts schedules. Games are constantly being postponed. Teams are stuck away from home frequently for days and sometimes for a week or more because the fog doesn’t lift or the storm doesn’t stop.
It was 3:15 in the morning when the Skagway teams left the ferry at Angoon on Admiralty Island, where there are reportedly more bears per square mile than anywhere else in the world. The Alaska ferries call at ports in the middle of the night, just as Greyhound buses do in the Lower 48.
Also getting off at Angoon were a number of Tlingit Indians, among them Thomas L. Jackson and his wife, Mona, both 76, from Kake. They, like the Skagway basketball players, had been on the Le Conte for 15 1/2 hours. Indians were coming to Angoon on ferryboats from several small villages to celebrate the 100th birthday of Jimmy George, a tribal elder.
In summer, the ferryboats are jammed with vacationers from the Lower 48. This time of the year, passengers are all Alaskans traveling back and forth to hospitals, funerals, weddings, christenings, on business, to shop in larger towns, to visit with friends and relatives.
Some are traveling to 40-day parties. When Alaska Indians die, friends and relatives care for the grieving family, providing food, shelter for visitors from other places, and companionship. Forty days later, the family of the departed throws a party for those who saw them through their time of grief.
And then there are the high school basketball players riding the ferryboats. During tournament time, some of the boats are jammed almost entirely with players and supporters.
From Angoon, the Le Conte went to Tenakee, population 105, a village with no paved streets, no sewer system, no water system, no doctor, no cars. The ferry stops at this fishing-logging town twice a week in each direction. Tenakee has a general store and a school with 12 students and two teachers.
The sun had come up. Spectacular snow-covered mountains spilled into the sea. The water was riveted with whitecaps. Sea lanes were marked with colored buoys. A long wake trailed the ship.
The waters are home to humpback and killer whales, sea lions, seals, sea otter. There were icebergs in Frederick Sound and Stephens Passage.
“A ferry hit an iceberg last year,” recalled Mike Duvall, 51, chief mate. “There was no major damage.”
As the ship headed up Icy Strait to Hoonah, Barb Brown, 43, a 6-foot-2, ordinary seaman and the only woman in the crew of 21, was at the wheel.
“Working the Alaska ferries is a much sought-after job,” she said. “The pay is good.
“Alaska is a special place,” she added. “You feel more free in Alaska. People accept people for what they are. It isn’t crowded, that’s for sure.”
The ferryboats are renowned for good grub. Second mate Mitchell Sharman, 38, mentioned how a ferry calls at the village of Pelican only once a month in winter, twice a month in summer.
“About 60 people live there,” he said. “It’s really out of the way on Chichagof Island. When we pull into Pelican, the whole town comes aboard to eat in the ship’s restaurant. It’s something different for them.
“And everybody (aboard) that can leave the ship does and goes ashore to Rosie’s Place for a great meal. The ferry is at Pelican three to four hours.”
John Larsen, the Le Conte’s skipper this trip, lives in Ketchikan, on a sailboat. He and the crew work seven days, then are off seven days.
“As captain, I’m paid $60,000,” he said. “I’m not getting rich but what a place to work! The mountains, the islands, the sea, the people. The biggest benefit is the time off.”
The Marine Highway’s nine ferryboats carry 400,000 passengers a year, serving as the streetcars of Southeast Alaska, a vital lifeline in America’s frontier state.
A few hours after the Le Conte docked in Juneau, Alaska’s tiny capital city, the Sitka Wolves were playing the Crimson Bears in the Juneau-Douglas High School gym, where Bears’ fans were singing what has to be one of the most unusual high school songs in the nation:
“Bum jigger,
“Hoe potato,
“Half-past an alligator.
“Boom, boom, boom a gator,
“Chick-a-wah-cha,
“Juneau-Douglas, rah, rah, rah!