High School Sports

In Week 2 of Alaska football, an Arizona team escapes the heat and weekly polls take some heat

A dinner buffet of salmon, halibut, caribou and moose. Photos of moose racks on trucks and players standing shoulder-to-broad-shoulder in a giant crab pot. Pizza on the Homer Spit.

The Champions aren't in Phoenix any more.

The Cesar Chavez Champions football team may as well be spending this week in Oz. That's how foreign Alaska must seem to high school kids who until this week had seldom ventured beyond Phoenix, Arizona.

The Champions are in Alaska to play the East T-birds on Friday night, but the 6 p.m. football game is just part of the team's itinerary.

The five-day trip began Tuesday with a milestone for most of the team's 35 players: boarding an airplane.

"Twenty-eight or twenty-nine of the kids have never been on an airplane," athletic director Lenny Doerfler said Thursday while enjoying an afternoon on the Homer Spit. "Eighteen haven't been out of the greater Phoenix area."

Now they've seen Anchorage, Soldotna and Homer, with stops along the way to take in sights like the Kenai River.

ADVERTISEMENT

"Their eyes are everywhere," Doerfler said. "They're taking pictures of everything."

And they're relishing the chance to go outside in sweatpants and sweatshirts without melting in the August heat, which is what happens down in Arizona.

"It's 105 (degrees) in Phoenix," Doerfler said. "Every time they go outside they moan and say, 'This is awesome.' The oceans, the mountains."

Friday's game is the first in a home-and-home series between East and Cesar Chavez, a pair of high schools with significant similarities. East will travel to Phoenix next year.

Cesar Chavez has an enrollment of 2,506 to East's 2,033. Both schools have large minority population enrollments — Cesar Chavez is 72.3 percent Hispanic, 14.4 percent black and 5.3 percent Native American; East last year was nearly 83 percent minority, including 22.6 percent Asian, 12.5 percent Hispanic, 11 percent Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian; 10.5 percent Alaska Native and 9 percent black.

"Their school mirrors East," said T-bird coach Jeff Trotter. "Big schools, very diverse, low income."

Trotter said Doerfler's longtime connection with Alaska high school football is the reason for the home-and-home series. For the last 20 years, Doerfler, a former high school and college coach, has coached at the annual All-Alaska Football Camp in Palmer, where he established long-lasting contacts.

Those contacts helped smoothed the way when the Champions started planning their trip to Alaska. Cesar Chavez sometimes play games in Tucson, Doerfler said, but for most road trips "we maybe go 15, 20 miles."

"When I first brought it up, a lot of people laughed," he said of the Alaska trip. "They thought I was joking."

The trip cost about $30,000, he said, most of it for airfare. Players held fundraisers and businesses made donations to make it  happen, he said.

The team spent Tuesday night in Anchorage before heading to the Kenai Peninsula. The Champions slept in the Soldotna High School weight room Wednesday and Thursday nights — a benefit of Doerfler's longtime friendship with Stars coach Galen Brantley Jr.

It's an experience of a lifetime for many of the players, Doerfler said. Teams from more affluent parts of Phoenix travel to California or other nearby states nearly every season, he said, and he was determined to make an out-of-state trip happen for the Champions when he became the school's athletic director last year.

"Why can't our kids go on trips like that?" Doerfler said. "And if you're gonna do it, why go to California? If we're gonna do it, let's go big."

Who’s No. 1? And why?

If rankings and polls exist to generate buzz, consider the Alaska Sports Broadcasting Network's high school football poll a raging success this week.

If rankings and polls exist to provide a credible pecking order of the state's top teams, consider it a dismal failure.

"We've taken some heat," ASBN's Kelly Thompson said Thursday after three days of blowback from this week's polls.

In both polls, the previously top-ranked team tumbled from the No. 1 spot. In Division I, Bartlett dropped to No. 2 despite a 19-point victory. In Division II/III, Soldotna disappeared entirely after losing by five  points to a ranked Division I team.

ADVERTISEMENT

Soldotna was punished for losing to the powerhouse West Eagles on the final play of last Friday's season-opening game in Soldotna.

The 18-13 loss, the result of a West touchdown as time expired, snapped Soldotna's state-record 59-game winning streak. It also knocked the Stars out of the rankings for the first time since Aug. 15, 2012.

Granted, giving the No. 1 spot to an 0-1 team might not sit well with some ASBN poll-voters. But to vanquish the Stars from the rankings altogether?

Seven Division II and Division III teams posted big victories last week, Thompson said, and it was hard to ignore teams that are 1-0 by virtue of decisive victories.

And, he said, voters were looking at the present, not the past. "What voters really came down to was, it was based on this year's team not last year's team," Thompson said.

That's generally smart thinking, but one game into the season is far too early to think Soldotna's time has passed.

The Stars have a system that perpetuates success year after year (after year after year), and a last-second loss to a team ASBN deems the third best in Division I isn't enough to keep Soldotna out of the rankings.

Just as baffling as Soldotna's disappearance is the flip-flopping of Bartlett and East in the Division I poll.

ADVERTISEMENT

Bartlett was ranked No. 1 going into its season opener in Maui against H.P. Baldwin High School. The Golden Bears won the Saturday night game 74-55, and two days later it dropped to No. 2.

Ascending from No. 2 to No. 1 was East, which opened with a 47-0 victory over Chugiak.

"They gave up 55 points, that was the big deal. They gave up 55 points," Thompson said. "For East to go in and annihilate Chugiak, that was just too much."

Thompson didn't identify the people who vote on the rankings, but said it's a group of 10 to 13 people including sportscasters, sportswriters and coaches (the Daily News does not vote in the poll).

He said he's been putting out football polls for nearly 20 years, "and I can tell you, it was the hardest poll we've ever had to do," he said.

A new poll will come out on Monday, giving Bartlett and Soldotna a chance to reassert themselves and the ASBN voters a chance to redeem themselves.

Week 2 schedule

Friday

Cesar Chavez at East, 6 p.m. RADIO: FM-93.7
Kenai at Homer, 6 p.m.
North Pole at Soldotna, 6:30 p.m.
South at Bartlett, 7 p.m.
Juneau at West, 7 p.m.
Colony at Palmer, 7 p.m.
Kodiak at Wasilla, 7 p.m.
Seward at Redington, 7 p.m.

Saturday's games

Houston at Monroe, 1 p.m.
Barrow at Eagle River, 2 p.m.
Valdez at Nikiski, 2 p.m.
Dimond at Lathrop, 5 p.m.
Chugiak at Service, 6 p.m.
West Valley at Eielson, 6 p.m.

Week 1 scores

ADVERTISEMENT

Friday

Colony 27, South 26
Eagle River 42, Houston 14
East 47, Chugiak 0
Ketchikan 49, Redington 14
Kodiak 56, Homer 15
West 18, Soldotna 13
West Valley 40, Service 35

Saturday

Barrow 40, Nikiski 7
Bartlett 74, Baldwin (Maui) 55
Dimond 35 Wasilla 21
Eielson 55, North Pole 34
Lathrop 49, Kenai 21
Monroe 27, Seward 12
Palmer 31, Juneau 8

ASBN weekly rankings

Division I

ADVERTISEMENT

1) East
2) Bartlett
3) West
4) Colony
5) Dimond

Division II/III

1) Palmer
2) Eielson
3) Barrow
4) Lathrop
5) West Valley

Beth Bragg

Beth Bragg wrote about sports and other topics for the ADN for more than 35 years, much of it as sports editor. She retired in October 2021. She's contributing coverage of Alaskans involved in the 2022 Winter Olympics.

ADVERTISEMENT