Playing high school basketball in Alaska was an awesome experience. Road trips consisted of extremely long and remote bus rides, short adventurous airplane commutes, sleeping in opponents’ gyms, and standing beside an occasional broken-down school bus in 15-below temperatures while waiting for the backup to arrive.
My senior year we had a great team. Some of us had been playing together for several years, and it was finally starting to show. It also helped having a new guy on the team who could play some serious ball. Jeff came from Texas and as a 6’5”center, he was a point guard’s dream.
As the team’s starting point guard, I enjoyed working with the big red head. I passed him the ball; he shot and scored. What’s not to like? He had post moves to make your head spin and hustled after every loose ball and missed shot—which was good because some games we had plenty of both to offer the young fellow from San Antonio.
That year we were winning more games than losing and by wide margins, too. Entering the state tournament, our record was solid. We won the first two games of the tourney in our hometown of Anchorage and then had to travel to another part of the nation’s largest state for our semi-finals. All that was needed was one more win and for the first time in our school’s history, we would automatically qualify to play for the small school state basketball championship!
Well, we made that one more win happen, thereby earning our team a trip to Galena. Even though most of us had grown up in Alaska, Galena’s location was one we had to research in the old Rand McNally. We discovered it was a mere 350 miles northwest of Anchorage. In the days of yore, high school basketball teams flew all over the Last Frontier for tourney time. Today, teams trek to Anchorage for the state title festivities.
Scheduled to fly out of Anchorage on a Wednesday night were the head coach, the starting five, and the manager. The rest of the team and the assistant coach would arrive in Galena on Thursday morning—at least, that was the plan on paper.
Our flight on Wednesday night was fine without any trouble, but the Thursday flight was another story indeed. It seems while some of us were sunning ourselves in Galena on a crisp, but cold, beautiful January morning, others were in Anchorage shoveling their buns off. Of all the times to get snowed in! All the flights Thursday morning out of Anchorage were cancelled. The starting five would have to go it alone. To top it off, one of my Galena mates drank some unbelievably rancid milk out of a carton during lunch that day at the host school’s cafeteria.
“Hey, Kraig. Come look at this.”
I walked toward Scott as he was pouring milk out of a carton. The only problem I could immediately detect was that the milk was chunky and yellow.
“Take a taste of it. It’s nasty.”
“Uh, no thanks, Scott. I believe ya.”
Scott was noticeably pale with light shades of gray after chugging two-thirds of the tainted dairy product. Who would have guessed that Scott would spend most of Thursday tossing his cookies? He tossed before the game, at the end of the first quarter, later at halftime, and finally at the conclusion of the game.
We took to the court for our first game in Galena with only five players (four and a half if you count the puker). Three of us ended the game in foul trouble, but thankfully no one fouled out. The game was close for a while, but then we went on a run and won going away.
Back at school in Anchorage, left-behind teammates, as well as other classmates, were thrilled to find out we had won and were headed to the championship game!
On Friday morning the rest of the squad joined us in Galena, and a strategy was planned for the game later that night.
For economic reasons, the girls’ state championship was held at the same time and location as the boys’. The night of the championship we shared a locker room with girls. Their game was first, so when they played the first quarter, we dressed; and when we played our first quarter, they showered and left the locker room.
The championship game was a struggle. There seemed to be a lid on our basket while the other team was shooting at what appeared to be a hula-hoop. Everything they blindly threw up was going in. We came out for the second half determined to play better than in the first. Our defense improved and shots started to fall. We were ahead late in the fourth quarter; even though the other team hit a stray basket here and there, it just didn’t matter. The scoreboard counted down to zeroes, the horn sounded, and our team ran around the court jumping, hugging, and laughing. We looked goofy, but we were state champs. Nets were cut, and then we made our victorious high-fiving way back to our locker room.
Upon opening the door we were horrified! A band of marauders had infiltrated our locker room and devilishly hung our underwear from the doors of each locker. Each one of us had been defiled!
The females we shared the dressing area with were a spirited bunch…of hooligans! Those tarts had the audacity to trifle with our underthings! To make matters even worse, I had Garth’s undies, Jerry had Jeff’s, and so on. Before we could even shower, our team had to check the labels and announce,
“Who wears BVD size 32?”
“Not me.”
“Who wears Jockey size 30, and they’re old?”
“Not me. I don’t wear any.”
Once we finished playing musical skivvies, we quickly showered and dressed.
You get the picture—twelve strapping young basketball players playing let’s make a deal, swapping undies and socks.
Not only did those tarts trifle, but they also pillaged our gym bags. Everybody’s crap was spread out all over the floor of the locker room. What a mess! I happened to notice that although there were twelve of us, there were only four cans of deodorant in the carnage, but there were six bottles of “Brut by Faberge.”
This was THE state tourney, so our coach had us wear suits to the game in an effort to represent our school in the best “fashionable” way possible. If that were really the case, he should have banned my leisure suit.
We “suited” up and put on our dress shoes. But as we were in the process of being shod, our feet “slid” into our dress shoes. I’m talking “slid,” as in, our socks were loaded with a substance making our feet gooey and slick. I pulled my foot out of my Tom McCann’s and there it was—toothpaste! Those girls had squeezed every last drop out of our Crest directly into our dress shoes!
We were hush puppy hopping mad!
“Let’s get them!”
We ran out of the locker room, out of the gym, and into Alaska’s winter. Now mind you, this was January in Alaska, so it wasn’t the warmest when we headed outdoors wearing just our suits. It was not one of our better decisions. One of the guys promptly fell on his rump, and the rest of us were trying not to kiss the frozen tundra as we slid across the gym’s parking lot. The sad news is that we never caught up to those rotten, no-good girls.
Our team did finish the season ranked tenth in the state for all schools, which wasn’t bad when you consider our total enrollment K-12 was approximately 150 students.
If you ever find yourself in Alaska, stop by Anchorage Christian Schools at 6575 E. Northern Lights Boulevard in Anchorage, Alaska, take a close look at the “1981 Small School State Champions” trophy. You just might notice a dab of toothpaste on the upper right corner.
