The Juneau Nordic School Team will get its first opportunity in many years to compete for the Alaska School Activities Association’s state championship in February, as the team has been granted interim “club” status as a Level 1 activity at both local high schools.
Making that decision — and raising funds for coaching, equipment and travel expenses proved easy, Juneau School District Superintendent Frank Hauser told the Juneau Board of Education last Tuesday night. The proposal making Nordic skiing a Level 1 activity was submitted in a letter to the district by the principals of Thunder Mountain High School and Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé, with the district then collecting and reviewing feedback.
“We looked at 26 individual emails expressing strong support for the establishment of the program and zero emails opposing the program,” Hauser said. “Right now we’re looking at 32 initial skiers from JDHS and six from Thunder Mountain High School as part of that team.”
The annual cost of $50,000 for equipment and travel will be raised by the program, Hauser said. The cost to the district for the next budget year will be $3,500 for a head coach and $2,300 for an assistant coach.
A decision still to be resolved is what will be the new name of the team.
“We’ve been going over this as a team and we haven’t decided,” said Abby McAllister, one of the current coaches of the Nordic team, in an interview Saturday. “I think the TMers want to keep the Falcons and I think the Crimson Bears want to be the Crimson Bears, so we haven’t gotten that far yet.”
“We’re not going to be the Huskies, I can tell you that,” she added, referring to the name given to Juneau’s football team that has students from both schools.
The high school Nordic team has been operated for many years by the Juneau Nordic Ski Club, a nonprofit organization that also works with younger students beginning in the first grade. McAllister said the high school team was affiliated with ASAA decades ago, but “it fell by the wayside.”
But participation in the Juneau Nordic Ski Club in recent years has increased to the point where the middle and high school participants were separated into their own groups, McAllister said.
“And then middle school was its own group of 30-some skiers and junior Nordic has been going strong for years,” she said. “And around the time we thought ‘we have this dedicated, recurring group of skiers coming up through high school. Why are we not ASAA-certified? Why are we not sanctioned?’ Because we could be competing against our peers in the rest of the state, which is really what we lack right now, we just compete against each other.”
McAllister said the team and individual skiers do travel to compete in non-ASAA events like open invitationals, the Arctic Winter Games and qualifiers for international competition. But she said now that the team is sanctioned again for ASAA competition the athletes and coaches will be able to focus more fully on skiing rather than the logistics.
“Being a sanctioned sport for the high school we have full use of all the school facilities,” she said. “We have the support from school admins when it comes to arranging travel plans, places to stay and all of that. We had to do all of that on our own (before). So as coaches now we really can give back to the athletes in a bigger way just because we have more time.”
As for how the team might do in the upcoming ASAA competition, McAllister said her primary thought is “if you’re going fast and having fun that’s awesome.”
“But we definitely have some kids who have the potential to break into the top 10 at regionals and state,” she added.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
