Anchorage Daily News

If you're looking for evidence that basketball is like a religion in parts of Alaska, consider the utter lack of uproar regarding the conflict this week between the state tournament and Easter week.

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A superstitious Charlie Dushkin of King Cove keeps adding threads to the frame of his eyeglasses before each game. He and his T-Jacks teammates defeated Fort Yukon in a boys 1A state tournament game March 18, 2008, at Sullivan Arena.

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Officials with both the Alaska School Activities Association and the Anchorage School District say they haven't heard a peep from players, parents or fans about the overlap.

Semifinals of the Class 4A and Class 3A tournaments are scheduled for Good Friday. And many of the teams will be traveling home on Easter Sunday, the day after the week-long tournament wraps up.

Both days on are the Anchorage School District's do-not-play list -- the roster of 12 holidays, all but one of them religious, on which school activities are banned.

The Anchorage School Board came up with the list last fall after a student protested the scheduling of a regional cross-country running championship on Yom Kippur.

No similar protests have been lodged about the 16 games scheduled on Good Friday, or the fact that Easter will be a travel day for many teams.

"We have not had any concerns registered," said John Andrews, director of special events for ASAA.

Neither has the School District, according to Todd Arndt, the Anchorage School District supervisor of secondary education.

"We've not heard anything," he said, other than a call from the Catholic Archdiocese of Anchorage, which asked the district to excuse Good Friday-related absences.

Arndt said the School District policy that forbids activities on specific holidays wouldn't apply to the state tournament anyway.

"It applies to things we schedule that are within our control," he said.

If last week's Cook Inlet Region tournament, which involves only Anchorage schools, had overlapped with Holy Week, the district would have changed the schedule to avoid games on Good Friday, Arndt said.

The state tournament is under ASAA's control, so the Anchorage policy doesn't apply.

Andrews said ASAA realized a year ago that state basketball would fall during Holy Week. But unless ASAA wanted to move the tournament out of Sullivan Arena -- and it doesn't -- there was no alternative.

"Sullivan schedules years in advance," Andrews said, "and we get the third week of March regardless. We couldn't move to another date even if we wanted to."

ASAA has rejected following Anchorage's lead and coming up with a list of holidays on which statewide school activities are banned. There are too many holidays, and too many activities, to avoid all conflicts, Andrews said.

"We schedule the best we can and hope the kids will be able to participate," he said.

FOUR-CORNER OFFENSE: We all know Alaska is huge. But sometimes we get a reminder of just how big, and our jaws drop.

Case in point: Tuesday's side-by-side games between the Fort Yukon and King Cove boys and the Point Hope and Kake girls.

Look at a map, and you'll see that three of the teams come from the far corners of the state: King Cove is on the Aleutian chain in the southwest, Kake is on the Panhandle in the southeast and Point Hope is on the Chukchi Sea in the northwest. And while the Interior village of Fort Yukon isn't exactly in the northeast corner of the state, it's close enough to make it the fourth corner on this vast square.

Only six points separated King Cove and Fort Yukon on the basketball court, but on the map, the towns are 976 air miles apart. That's about 20 miles more than the distance separating Seattle from Los Angeles.

That's nothing compared to the 1,282 air miles between Point Hope and Kake. Cover a similar distance in the Lower 48, and you could fly from Denver to Atlanta.

ANATOMY OF A PLAYER: From head to toe, Charlie Dushkin is as different as they come.

A bruising post player for King Cove, Dushkin stands out for a number of reasons.

Start from the bottom and work your way up:

Dushkin is the only guy on the team who wears bumblebee socks -- black-and-gold striped socks that go up to his knees.

They match King Cove's black and gold uniforms, which is why Dushkin chooses to wear them for games instead of the traditional athletic socks his teammates prefer.

"I figure the more spirit I have, the more heart I've got," he said after scoring 12 points to help the T-Jacks to a 55-49 victory over Fort Yukon in the first round of Class 1A boys tournament.

From the socks we move up to Dushkin's jersey, which is supposed to sport the number 51. But on Tuesday, Dushkin left the top of his uniform in his hotel room and had to borrow the No. 10 jersey from a bench player who wasn't as forgetful.

"I was in a rush and half asleep," Dushkin explained. (And to be fair, King Cove's 11:20 a.m. tip-off Tuesday qualified as early in the world of high school basketball.)

From the jersey we move to the head and Dushkin's eyeglasses. In what has become a pregame ritual, Dushkin pulls small threads of string from the drawstring in his shorts and ties them to the temples of his glasses, just in front of the curved ear piece.

He started doing this several years ago because the thickness of the string keeps the glasses snug on his head. He keeps doing it because it's become a superstition.

"I've been doing it for a couple of years for good luck," he said. "Every game I use a different string."

No one is about to give Dushkin any grief for his peculiarities. He's too intimidating.

He's a tough 6-foot-3 senior with a barrel chest and an apparent immunity to pain. As one of King Cove's big men he spends time playing around the rim, but he spends just as much time sprawled across the floor. He's not afraid to throw himself on the floor in pursuit of the basketball.

"Back home they call me the Garbage Man, because if there's a loose ball, I go get it," Dushkin said. "My body's hard to bruise."

Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4309.

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