Kyle Fossman led the Haines High School boys’ basketball teams to state championships in 2008 and 2010 and may hold the school record for career points. But he may not.

The career scoring record-holder is not known with certainty because the high school hasn’t kept records consistently for basketball, or apparently for any other school sport or activity.

The one record board in the school building isn’t actually in the school. It’s at the Haines pool, showing the best times posted by members of the Haines Dolphins swim club.

Jim Stanford, who has served as a track coach or assistant for about 20 years, is working to set up a record board for track and field, and – with help from the school district – he’s hoping the effort spreads to other sports and activities.

“These are accomplishments Haines students have achieved. They should be recognized on an official basis. That, I think, is the least we can do,” Stanford said this week.

After about a month of research through the Internet, newspapers in Haines and Juneau, and Juneau school records, Stanford last week circulated a tentative list of boys’ and girls’ track and field records.

Soon after, he had to make two revisions, moving Ashley Sage into top spot for women’s shot put and giving Mary Hertz the school record in 100-meter hurdles. That information came from Sage, the school district secretary, who had newspaper clippings to prove her claims.

Stanford is hoping that circulation of the list will bring others forward to make additional revisions, provided there is documentation. In the absence of school records, numbers published in a newspaper will be enough to stake a claim.

“It’s interesting how it’s evolved and how it’s going to evolve even more… There’s a question if a newspaper article is enough to verify a record. In the perfect world, the region would have kept all the records from the (regional) track meet, but we may have to rely on periodicals and other sources,” Stanford said.

Since 2008, Haines track meet results have been posted on the website athletic.net. But for previous years, the records trail is a zigzag course. A record board was once hung from the gymnasium wall, but that was removed in the mid-1980s. A track coach in Juneau has records of regional championships and dual meets back to 2002. Archives for Juneau newspapers go back more than 100 years, but the Chilkat Valley News started in 1966 and didn’t cover high school sports consistently until the 1990s.

Other records might be recorded on trophies or awards.

A few Southeast records held by Haines athletes – Charlie DeWitt’s 21-foot, five-inch long jump in 1973 and Danny Pardee’s 38.97 run in the 300 hurdles in 1997 – are in regional record books in Juneau.

But only a few records on Stanford’s list date back before the 1990s, suggesting others may be missing.

Complications in comparing records include that race distances got longer with a switch from yards to meters in the early 1980s, so some may not be directly comparable or will require parallel listings or asterisks. The development of all-weather tracks also skews the field toward more recent athletes, he said.

“All the results won’t be based on the same (factors) nowadays, but you can still get a really good idea of what the athletes were doing. All records have to be subject to a little flexibility,” Stanford said. “We’re trying to get an idea of who had the best results.”

Stanford said he hopes the district creates a website where records can be posted for all sports, as well as activities like music and Drama, Debate and Forensics. “Kids that participate in these things deserve to know what some of these individual records are.”

Already students are checking out his listing of track records, he said. “I’ve already heard kids saying, ‘I think I can beat that.’”

Steve Fossman, who has coached the boys’ varsity basketball team since 2006, said he’s been wondering about records for years. He played on Haines High School’s varsity basketball team 1977-80 and knows that he held two regional, season scoring records because the Juneau Empire would publish leaders in its sports section.

“I’ve always been curious how Terry Sele and guys like that did. It would be nice for people like Terry to be able to punch into a computer and see how he did. There’s some kids in town who don’t even know that some of these old guys even played. I think it would surprise them to see how some of them did,” Fossman said.

Fossman’s wife Ann Fossman kept basketball statistics studiously during son Kyle’s four years on the team – even going so far as paying a student to videotape games – because those numbers are critical for securing scholarships, she said. “If we have a kid we think can win a scholarship, I put every effort into keeping all the stats.”

She is fairly certain Kyle’s 45 points against Sitka on Feb. 21, 2009 is a single-game scoring record for the boys’ team. But as an example of how records were kept in the past, Fossman mentioned finding scorebooks from husband Steve’s varsity team in a girls’ locker room trash can in 2007.

Steve Fossman said the boys’ varsity basketball team has scorebooks back to 2006, and some records might be compiled from them. “They’re all in different places, in shoe boxes and under beds. It would be a monumental task for me to find them and put them in order,” Ann Fossman said.

Basketball is chock full of statistics and records, ranging from tallies of assists, rebounds and turnovers to percentages for free throws and field goals.

Some of those could be interesting for comparing players, Fossman said. “You could have a player with an all-time record in shooting percentage but he only scored half the total points of another player.”

Consideration also would have to be given to rule changes like the three-point shot, which wasn’t adopted until the late 1980s.

Fossman said records would “really help” in terms of motivating athletes. “I think it would benefit kids out for all sports, for the parents and athletes to see them and have something to shoot for. There are a lot of different records. With computers, you’d think it would be easy to lock that in at the school.”

Compiling consistent basketball records would likely require paying someone and would have to come as a directive from the school district, Fossman said.

“Everybody’s got to be on board to make it work… Track (records) would be easy to get going. It would be a little more of a challenge in basketball, but I’m in favor of it. You’d definitely have some people coming forward to generate some research. Once you start posting records (and someone disagrees with a listing), you’re going to hear it.”

School activities director Tiana Taylor said that for now, she is just looking to replace the track record board that was removed from the gym.

Keeping records for other sports and activities would involve a lot of questions, including which records to keep, where to keep them, and who would be responsible for keeping and updating them, she said.

“That would have to be a bigger conversation that would involve funding and happen at the district level,” Taylor said. “For now, this is strictly track.”

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