With no Dome and no clear fields, Anchorage soccer teams still stuck inside

After weeks of kicking soccer balls down school hallways, into trash cans and against gymnasium walls, Anchorage soccer programs received a glimmer of hope that they might be outside soon.

The Municipality of Anchorage will allow volunteers to shovel Kincaid Park's turf soccer field at 10 a.m. Sunday, multiple soccer coaches said Saturday.

"It's nice that somebody is saying we can do this,"  Service boys coach Dan Rufner said.

The Anchorage School District's policy is to let snow and ice on turf fields melt naturally, but with the January collapse of The Dome, teams were left without an early season venue for games and practices.

If volunteers armed with plastic shovels — no metal allowed — can clear the Kincaid field, it should create a venue for Cook Inlet Conference games while teams wait for the fields at their schools to clear.

"There should be quite an army out there," Bartlett boys coach Matt Froehle said.

Derek Hagler, the ASD activities director for secondary education, said the district's policy is to let its turf fields clear naturally without using equipment.

"We let our fields naturally melt so we don't potentially do any damage to the multimillion-dollar investment that's there," Hagler said. "We usually plan to be inside at The Dome from March 15 to April 15, but with the unexpected collapse of The Dome, we weren't able to do that."

Normally, each CIC team plays its first four games at The Dome, the air-supported indoor facility that opened in 2007. So far, eight scheduled conference games — four boys games and four girls games — have been scrapped.

Luke Almon, the ASD coordinator for soccer, said the district will decide Monday whether the next slate of CIC games, scheduled from Thursday to Saturday, will be played.

If another round of games is missed, the district will then decide whether or not to reschedule the games or play a shortened season, Almon said. A full conference schedule typically includes 14 games for each school — each of the CIC's eight teams plays everyone else twice, with the top three advancing to the state tournament.

"The best thing I can say is we're in uncharted territory at that point, trying to figure out how that goes," Almon said. "Whatever the solution is (it) would be equitable to all teams and everyone would have an equal chance to play for (a state berth)."

Hagler said if The Dome is not repaired by next year, the district will look into ways to clear the fields without damaging the synthetic turf, perhaps by leaving a layer of ice to protect it. But that would lead to another challenge, he said.

"If we could magically or safely get the snow off the field, then where do you put that snow and what does that expense cost taxpayers when we're laying off teachers and those types of things?" Hagler said.

[Anchorage sports dome collapses under snow]

Without a place to play in town, many CIC teams have played nonconference games at Colony High, which had a playable field more than two weeks ago.

Colony coach Jeremy Johnson, who coaches both the boys and girls teams, said his players shoveled snow for six days. By Saturday, Colony's boys and girls teams had already played seven games apiece.

Johnson said Colony is not allowed to clear its field with machinery or ice picks, but clearing snow with plastic shovels is permitted.

"That was our mantra — we want to play so we're going to shovel the field," Johnson said. "This was the first time in I don't know how many years, maybe over 20 years, (that) we've had every single Anchorage school on our schedule."

Dimond girls coach Tim Valesko, whose defending state champion Lynx defeated the Knights 5-0 Tuesday in Palmer, said it was nice for his players to get on a real pitch and play in open space.

"Looking at Dimond's field, I don't see it being cleared for another three weeks," Valesko said Wednesday. "It would have to be unusually warm to melt quick enough."

The Service boys, meanwhile, went to the Lower 48 to get some outdoor action.

Rufner said the Cougars usually make a trip south every other year, but they decided to travel in back-to-back seasons after The Dome went down.

Service practiced and played for a weekend in March in Vancouver, Washington. The Cougars went to Portland one day to watch the Portland Timbers in a Major League Soccer game.

"We weren't planning on traveling this year, but when The Dome collapsed in January we knew it was going to be ugly so we said, 'Why wait until next year? Let's do it now,' " Rufner said. "It worked out this year because we didn't expect to be (practicing) in gyms for so long, so it made it even better that we got a little bit of outdoor soccer."

With the snow-covered fields keeping all of Anchorage's spring-sport athletes indoors, soccer teams are fighting for gym time with track, baseball and softball teams. Four outdoor track and field meets have been canceled so far, while softball and baseball teams are slated to begin playing later this month.

Froehle said Bartlett's soccer practices sometimes overlap with the baseball team's practices.

"Some nights the last 15 minutes of our session and the first 15 minutes of theirs we'll all be together doing our speed and quickness training," Froehle said. "We get creative and collaborate with a lot of our work."