Quick trips, missed opportunities: High school sports teams weigh risk of coming to Anchorage to pursue state titles

With infections spiking in Anchorage just in time for Alaska’s first high school state championships of the COVID-19 era, some schools outside Alaska’s biggest city are confounding conventional sports wisdoms.

Home-field advantage? Not worth it to the Colony Knights football team, which is giving up a first-round home game in the playoffs next week because the Mat-Su Borough School District decided it’s safer to bring kids to Anchorage than welcome a bunch of Anchorage residents to the Valley.

“It’s all about what we can control,” said Reese Everett, the district’s associate superintendent of education. “We have far more control over the variables with our students than we do with all of the variables that go into hosting an event, like (out-of-town) spectators who may go out to eat after the game or go shopping.”

Pregame warmups? Might not happen for the Juneau Huskies football team, which is minimizing its time in Anchorage for an 11 a.m. playoff game next week. The Huskies will make a 10-hour road trip bookended by a 7:20 a.m. flight to Anchorage and a 3:30 p.m. return flight to Juneau.

“It’s a show-and-go game," Juneau-Douglas athletic director Chad Bentz said. “They’re literally going to get off the plane, get on the bus, go to the field, play the game, get on the bus, get on the plane.”

Consider the Knights and the Huskies the lucky ones. Not all schools are letting athletes come to Anchorage for Saturday’s state cross-country championships at Kincaid Park and state tennis championships at the Alaska Club East.

The real eye-opener will be on display at 11 a.m. Saturday at Kincaid Park, when the state cross-country championships begin with the Division III races for Alaska’s smallest schools.

Last year the Division III races had 157 runners. This year it will have 23 — eight girls and 15 boys.

Many schools decided long ago not to travel this fall, and some canceled fall sports altogether. The Northwest Arctic Borough School District, which includes Kotzebue and surrounding villages, canceled fall sports in early September; the North Slope Borough School District includes a Barrow Whalers team that has competed in virtual meets all season amid hunker-down orders and a Point Hope team that is sending runners to Anchorage.

Some made more immediate decisions not to participate. Most if not all Region V schools in Southeast Alaska held regional meets last week but decided later not to send kids to state.

As part of its mitigation for hosting this week’s state cross country and tennis championships, the Alaska School Activities Association eliminated team competition and reduced the number of participants.

On Monday, ASAA and the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services sent a letter to all school districts alerting them to rising COVID-19 cases in Anchorage.

“Transmission (in Anchorage) has significantly increased in the last few weeks. Case rates continue to rise, signaling widespread community transmission,” it said in part. "Travel between communities with lower community transmission rates and Anchorage poses additional health risks to travelers and the communities to which they return.

“ASAA’s mitigation plan for state competitions aim(s) to reduce the risks associated with travel and gathering for competition, however mitigation of all risk associated with travel and gathering is not possible.”

The mitigation plan for the Juneau-Douglas tennis team is to not come to the state tournament — a choice made by coaches, Bentz said. The mitigation process for the football team, which includes players from Juneau-Douglas and Thunder Mountain high schools, hinges on not spending the night or eating a meal in Anchorage.

“We did not really want to spend the night,” Bentz said. “That would have been something to really think about.”

The Huskies are the only football team in the Juneau School District and they haven’t played a game all season because of travel restrictions. Getting the district’s approval to come to Anchorage next week is huge, Bentz said, but he’s happy just to have practices for fall sports teams.

“Even if they didn’t get to go, we are still very thankful everyone had a chance to participate at all through this very challenging time,” he said. “We tell the coaches all the time, if we’re allowed to practice, that’s a win. If we get to play an intrasquad scrimmage, that’s even bigger. If we can play Thunder Mountain, great. If we can travel, amazing. Just be thankful for what we do get to participate in.”

The state cross country meet will happen without the Kodiak Bears, long a dominant program.

“They are staying home,” said Debbie Rohrer, the athletic director for the Kodiak Island Borough School District. “We started having school in-person and it’s really important we keep it that way. We just felt like it was a good choice."

Everett said the Mat-Su district has the same goal — maintaining in-person classes.

“Our mission now is to keep kids in in-school learning,” he said. “It’s been almost a quarter now, and if we’re able to do that and support participation in extracurricular activities, that’s what we want to do.”

The decision to give up a home game during the football playoffs came after meetings with public health officials, district officials and school officials, Everett said.

“We focused on what we can control,” he said. In the end, it was determined that controlling how kids get to and from a game in Anchorage was far more possible than controlling visitors from the high-risk zone in Anchorage who would have come to the Valley for a game.

Only participants deemed essential will make the trip, Everett said. That means no marching band, no cheerleaders, no injured players and not even players who are unlikely to see action. A seating chart will be used for riding the bus in case contact tracing is needed, and players will be grouped in “cohorts” on the bus and on the sideline, he said.