Connect with us

Alaska

Out-of-state powerhouses at Alaska Airlines Classic take Anchorage’s wet winter weather in stride

Published

on

Out-of-state powerhouses at Alaska Airlines Classic take Anchorage’s wet winter weather in stride


The last time basketball players from Heritage Christian School came up to the Last Frontier to participate in the annual Alaska Airlines Classic was two years ago.

Head coach Paul Tait and the team from Northridge, California, were able to experience a true Alaska winter as they arrived in the middle of a typical snowy season.

But with this winter marked by unseasonably warm weather and rain, the team couldn’t really lean on their previous experience when deciding on the appropriate attire to pack.

Advertisement

“We did not bring any umbrellas,” Tait said with a chuckle. “It’s funny. The last couple weeks, we talked about boots and snow jackets and everything else, and then I check the weather about five days ago and I’m like, ‘Hold up a second, let’s make sure we have rain boots and different types of gear.’ But we have Southern California kids, so anything below 65, they start freaking out — so rain or snow, it didn’t matter.”

The Warriors only have three players on this year’s team who made the last trip as sophomores and are now seniors. Star forward and San Jose State University commit Tae Simmons and guard Jesse Tweneboah played in those games. Forward Dylan Shaw, a Saint Mary’s College commit, had suffered an injury in their last game before the tournament, and had to spend the entire trip on crutches.

In Heritage’s 59-36 win over Colony on Thursday in the opening round of the tournament, Shaw led the team with 21 points in his Alaska Airlines Classic debut. Simmons narrowly came in second with 20 points. That total far exceeded the eight points he was held to the last time he was on the West High court, in a 2023 tournament championship loss to Anchorage’s own Grace Christian.

“It’s always incredible coming up here,” Tait said. “We enjoyed our experience last time. We’re just trying to shake off the rust of travel and everything and also know there are a few teams that traveled even farther than us, so it was good to get the first win under our belt.”

Those three returners told teammates who were making the trip to the Alaska Airlines Classic for the first time about how unique of an opportunity it was.

Advertisement

“Just getting out and seeing different experiences,” Tait said. “We did the zoo last time and we’ll do the wildlife observatory Friday, dog sledding on Saturday maybe, just fun stuff.”

He told his wife shortly after they got married that he’d like to come up to Alaska with his team every four to five years to give each generation a chance to experience it — but he didn’t wait nearly as long this time.

Coming to Alaska, Alabama juggernaut gets reprieve from winter snow

Hoover High School last made the trek to the 49th state from Alabama to take part in the Alaska Airlines Classic over a decade ago, in January 2013. That was before Scott Ware was the head coach of the Buccaneers. This year’s trip is a first-time experience for every player on the team and coach on the staff.

“We had a lot of opportunities to play in different places throughout the country, and we kind of held off to see what was best for us, and when this opportunity came up, we wanted to come back,” Ware said. “We heard from the previous staff how good of a tournament it was, so we wanted to make this trip.”

When they committed to compete in the Classic and started making plans, the Alabama powerhouse program had no idea that it’d actually be warmer in Alaska than it was back home.

Advertisement

“It’s actually colder at home in Alabama and more snow than when we left,” Ware said. “It is what it is. We’re just happy to be here. We’ve played from Florida to the Midwest. We’ve been all over and thought this would be a great opportunity.”

There was 6 inches of snow in Orange Beach, Alabama, when they left, which is less than 4 1/2 hours from Hoover by car.

The undefeated Buccaneers brought heavy jackets and boots but didn’t think to bring their umbrellas, which would’ve been more useful.

“It’s good to travel, guys are making lifelong memories and this is a special group of guys we’ve got,” Ware said. “They’ve been special for four years now and we have a bunch of seniors who have accomplished a lot, but when you talk to them, some of the trips we’ve been on have been a bigger thing for them than winning a state championship.”

Hoover is the two-time defending Alabama state champion of the 7A division. It’s the first nationally ranked team to participate in the Classic in nearly a decade and a half, and the first top-10 ranked squad in several decades.

Advertisement

Ware and his team relish the chance to see some of the best competition Alaska has to offer, and they could potentially face two-time defending 4A state champion Bettye Davis East if both teams advance to Saturday’s final.

“It’s good to get out and see how people play and do things around the country,” he said. “Obviously basketball is basketball, but people approach it differently, so just to kind of see different styles throughout the country and the way they approach things is good so that we’ve seen a little bit of everything when we get to the playoffs.”

The Buccaneers are led on and off the court by 6-foot-9, 250-pound senior power forward DeWayne Brown, who is committed to play at the Division I level at the University of Tennessee.

“He’s an incredible kid, he’s an incredible person, obviously has a great skillset in basketball,” Ware said. “He does a little bit of everything for us but what people don’t see is his basketball IQ. It’s off the charts. He takes what the game gives him and plays that way.”

In Hoover’s 69-26 win over Service on Thursday, Brown scored a game-high 20 points in two and a half quarters of action before sitting out the entire fourth quarter. Even though he’s talented and physically gifted enough to take over a game and seemingly score at will, he often kicks the ball out to his teammates when they’re open for uncontested looks.

Advertisement

“It was just always in me to be unselfish and just play basketball the right way and make the right play,” Brown said.

After not attempting any dunks in the first quarter, Brown slammed down a quartet in the second on some alley-oops and fast breaks, which got the crowd excited.

“It just got kind of easy,” he said. “It’s fun hearing the crowd go crazy. It always kind of motivates you to keep going. I feel like once you get the crowd into the game, it makes you play a little bit harder.”

While Brown didn’t join the team until his freshman year of high school, this group has played together since the third grade and it shows in their chemistry on the court.

“Our guys love each other and they’ve been best friends for a really long time,” Ware said. “We’ve didn’t have kids move in from all over the place to form this team. These are Hoover kids, they’ve grown up together, they spend time outside of basketball together. If you see one, you always see four or five of them.”

Advertisement





Source link

Alaska

Alaska High School Girls Basketball 2026 ASAA State Championship Brackets – March 10

Published

on

Alaska High School Girls Basketball 2026 ASAA State Championship Brackets – March 10


The 2026 Alaska high school girls basketball state championships begin this week, and High School On SI has brackets for all four classifications.

The brackets will be updated with scores and matchups throughout the week.

All four classifications will play their state championship games at Alaska Airlines Center in Anchorage.

Advertisement

The 1A and 2A championships run March 11-14. Classes 3A and 4A play the following week, March 18-21.

Alaska High School Girls Basketball 2026 State Championship Brackets, Matchups, Schedule – March 10

3/11 – Shaktoolik (1) vs. Arlicaq (16)

3/11 – Kake (8) vs. Tri-Valley (9)

Advertisement

3/11 – Fort Yukon (4) vs. Andreafski (13)

Advertisement

3/11 – Sand Point (5) vs. Napaaqutgmiut (12)

3/11 – Scammon Bay (2) vs. Nunamiut (15)

3/11 – Akiuk Memorial (7) vs. Newhalen (10)

3/11 – Davis-Romoth (3) vs. Cook Inlet Academy (14)

Advertisement

3/11 – Hoonah (6) vs. Shishmaref (11)


3/12 – Seward (1) vs. Chevak (8)

3/12 – Metlakatla (4) vs. Cordova (5)

Advertisement

3/12 – Craig (2) vs. Susitna Valley (7)

Advertisement

3/12 – Glennallen (3) vs. Degnan (6)


3/18 – Barrow (1) vs. Kotzebue (8)

Advertisement

3/18 – Grace Christian (4) vs. Galena (5)

Advertisement

3/18 – Monroe Catholic (2) vs. Delta (7)

3/18 – Mt. Edgecumbe (3) vs. Kenai Central (6)

Advertisement

3/18 – Mountain City Christian Academy (1) vs. North Pole (8)

Advertisement

3/18 – Colony (4) vs. West (5)

3/18 – Bartlett (2) vs. Juneau-Douglas (7)

3/18 – Wasilla (3) vs. Service (6)


More Coverage from High School On SI



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Alaska

Made In The USA: The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company

Published

on

Made In The USA: The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company


This is the Alaska Wall Tent by the Alaska Gear Company, each one is made in the United States from Sunforger 13oz DLX, a double-filled, pre-shrunk, marine-grade canvas ideal for longterm outdoor use.

The Alaska Wall Tent comes in an array of sizes and versions, allowing you to choose the one that best suits your individual use-case. They’re all individually made in Alaska, and perhaps even more importantly, they’re all tested extensively to be able to handle local conditions.

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 5

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 2

Image DescriptionThis is the Alaska Wall Tent by the Alaska Gear Company, each one is made in the United States from Sunforger 13oz DLX, a double-filled, pre-shrunk, marine-grade canvas ideal for longterm outdoor use.

History Speedrun: The Alaska Gear Company

The Alaska Gear Company was formerly known as Airframes Alaska, it’s an aviation and outdoor equipment supplier and manufacturer headquartered in Palmer, Alaska. The company is led by majority owner Sean McLaughlin, who bought the original bush airplane parts business when it had just two employees and $100,000 in annual revenue. McLaughlin has since grown it to approximately 100 employees and $20 million in annual sales.

The company can trace its early roots to a licensed maker of Piper PA-18 Super Cub fuselages at Birchwood Airport. Through a series of acquisitions, including Reeve Air Motive (an aircraft parts retailer operating out of Anchorage’s Merrill Field since 1950, Alaska Tent & Tarp, and Northern Sled Works, the company grew well beyond aviation into outdoor recreation and cold-weather gear.

Advertisement

That diversification ultimately drove the rebrand from Airframes Alaska to Alaska Gear Company in late 2023, as the old name no longer conveyed the full scope of what the company produces and sells.

The Alaska Gear Company now operates out of three locations – a 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Palmer, a production facility in Fairbanks, and a retail store with an in-house sewing workshop at Merrill Field in Anchorage.

Its product lines span two major categories. On the aviation side, the company is best known for its hand-built Alaskan Bushwheel tundra tires, FAA-approved titanium landing gear, Super Cub fuselage modifications, and a wide range of bush plane parts. On the outdoor side, it manufactures Arctic Oven hot tents, canvas wall tents, custom freight and pulk sleds, and a modernized version of the iconic military bunny boot designed for extreme cold weather conditions.

More recently in 2024, the Alaska Gear Company was named “Made in Alaska Manufacturer of the Year” by the Alaska Department of Commerce.

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company

The Alaska Canvas Wall Tent is a handmade-in-Alaska canvas tent made from 13oz Sunforger DLX double-filled, preshrunk, marine-grade cotton canvas that’s treated to resist fire, water, and mildew while still remaining breathable.

Advertisement

It comes in four sizes, including 8×10, 10×12, 12×14, and 14×16 feet, all with 5-foot wall heights, and it’s available either unframed (starting at $1,295) or with a frame (starting at $2,300). The unframed version can be constructed in the field using lengths of wood sourced from the area, reducing the initial pack weight – this is crucial for trips into the wilderness by bush plane where every pound of weight is critical.

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 7

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 4

Image DescriptionIt comes in four sizes, including 8×10, 10×12, 12×14, and 14×16 feet, all with 5-foot wall heights, and it’s available either unframed (starting at $1,295) or with a frame (starting at $2,300). The unframed version can be constructed in the field using lengths of wood sourced from the area, reducing the initial pack weight – this is crucial for trips into the wilderness by bush plane where every pound of weight is critical.

All tents include a 4.5 inch oval stove jack for use with wood or propane stoves, as well as a 56 inch triangular rear window with insect screening, an 18oz vinyl sod cloth around the base to block drafts and moisture, ridgepole openings at both ends, rope-reinforced eaves, brass grommets, overlapping door flaps with ties, a heavy-duty zippered door, and 100 feet of sisal rope for tie-downs.

The tents are now available to buy direct from the Alaska Gear Company here, and at the time of writing they have stock ready to ship out immediately.

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 10
The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 9
The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 8
The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 3

Images courtesy of the Alaska Gear Company



Source link

Continue Reading

Alaska

Lakes are growing in Alaska. That’s not entirely a bad thing

Published

on

Lakes are growing in Alaska. That’s not entirely a bad thing

The St. Elias Mountains in southeast Alaska are dotted with over 100 lakes where glaciers crumble into milky, turquoise water. Those lakes are expanding at an ever-quickening pace.

The lakes will quadruple in size over the next century or two, scientists report March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This growth will transform landscapes, create new salmon habitat and may even change the course of a major river.

“We are seeing the great age of ice retreat” in Alaska, says Daniel McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “These glaciers are just peeling back from the landscape,” revealing deep grooves they carved in the Earth, where lakes are now forming.

Glacial hydrologist Eran Hood of the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, who was not part of the study, adds that “understanding where these lakes are going to emerge is important” because it “changes the whole nature of the downstream ecosystem.”

Advertisement

Hugging the coastline along the Alaska-Canada border, the tiny mountainous region that includes the St. Elias Mountains is losing 60 cubic kilometers of ice per year. Because lakes absorb solar heat, the glaciers that shed ice into lakes are shrinking faster than those that terminate on dry land. Across southeast Alaska, these lakes attached to glaciers have expanded by 60 percent since 1986, reaching a combined area of 1,300 square kilometers.

McGrath and his colleagues wondered how far this runaway expansion might go. So, they combined satellite images with estimates of ice thickness — mapping deeply eroded grooves that are still hidden under glaciers.

The results were “eye-opening,” McGrath says. The team identified 4,200 square kilometers of glacier-covered grooves adjacent to existing lakes.

He and his colleagues predict that the lakes will continue to expand — causing rapid ice retreat — until they fill those grooves, reaching a combined size of around 5,500 square kilometers, an area the size of Delaware.

“By the end of this century, all of these lakes will probably be more or less fully developed,” says study coauthor Louis Sass III, a glaciologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at the Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. But those growing lakes are already reshaping entire landscapes in a way that is often overlooked in public discourse around glacier retreat.

Many of Alaska’s glaciers terminate on dry land, and their meltwater often creates barren, rocky floodplains downstream, where the streams alternate between trickles and floods — constantly branching and shifting course as they lay down sediment released by the glacier.

“Those habitats are fairly inhospitable for a lot of fish,” including some salmon, says Jonathan Moore, an aquatic ecologist with Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. The water is too cold, and fish eggs “get swept out or buried by the floods every year.”

But as glaciers retreat into lakes and those lakes expand, their meltwater has time to drop its sediment and warm a few degrees in the lake before spilling into a river. Rivers that carry less sediment are less prone to shifting channels.

Advertisement

A 2025 study by Moore and remote sensing scientist Diane Whited of the University of Montana found that as glacial lakes expanded over 38 years in southeast Alaska, the downstream river channels stabilized, allowing willows and bushes to spread across floodplains.

“It creates salmon habitat,” Hood says. A 2021 study by Moore and Hood predicted that by 2100, glacial retreat in southeast Alaska will transform 6,000 kilometers of river channels into decent habitat for some local species of salmon. The lakes themselves will create spawning grounds for sockeye salmon — an important commercial species.

But these changes will come with upheaval.

For instance, one major river, the Alsek, will probably shift its course as retreating glaciers cause two lakes to merge, providing an easier path to the ocean.

People in Juneau are feeling another dramatic effect of expanding lakes. At least once per year, a lake dammed by the nearby Mendenhall Glacier spills out in a flash flood that gushes through town, forcing some residents to build protective levees around their homes.

Advertisement

These ecosystems “are going to be transformed,” Moore says. “But that transformation is going to be pretty violent and pretty dangerous.”



Source link
Continue Reading

Trending