Dalton Henry and Jackson Long walk towards a crowd of more than a dozen people who met them at the small boat harbor.
The music blared and about two dozen people cheered as seven young men walked up the slippery ramp from an Allen Marine boat in the Small Boat Harbor to the parking lot Monday morning in freezing temperatures.
The occasion: the return of the Glacier Bears wrestling team from a monumental showing at the state championship in Anchorage, where the tiny team snagged a second-place finish against schools with twice as many athletes. Along the way, junior Dalton Henry nabbed a solo title and the teammates racked up four second-place finishes.
On top of that, coach Andus Hale was named coach of the year and the Glacier Bears won the team sportsmanship award.
What made it all the more impressive was the hectic and exhausting travels the team endured to get to and from the tournament. They were blocked out from crossing the Canadian border last week, and forced to ferry to Juneau in seas as high as eight feet to make it to Anchorage in the nick of time before the tournament began.
“It was super special,” said Hale of the tournament after arriving in Haines. “The boys are tired. They put it all on the line.”
Getting there
The Glacier Bears team has appeared to gain steam throughout the season and were poised for historic performances at state.
At regionals, they bagged four wins, including Leo Wald’s win in the ultra-competitive 171-pound weight class.
The Bears knew they faced a long travel day on Wednesday, Dec. 12, when they planned to drive to Tok for the night and then on to Anchorage. They arrived for a quick practice at 6 a.m. before boarding the van around 10 a.m. to the border station 40 miles up the highway.
They arrived in the middle of howling winds, and border guards told them the highway was closed. The vans turned around and drove to 33 Mile Roadhouse, before making a second attempt just after noon.
That time, the snow had picked up and the highway wasn’t plowed past the border. The vans retreated back to town.
Hale called a couple helicopter companies to see if there was a way to get to Juneau but even with the added cost of a helicopter ride, the companies wouldn’t be able to get everyone there in time.
That’s when the team turned to plan C, which coach Jake Mason had been formulating with Brent Crowe, the owner of the 89-foot Pavlof tender. The idea was to get the team to Juneau to take a jet to Anchorage.
Jim Stickler reads an Anchorage Daily News story about the Haines wrestling team’s travel challenges. The team’s trip to Anchorage brought it statewide attention. Lex Treinen photo
But both the time frame and the weather window were narrow. In order to get to Anchorage in time for the mandatory weigh-in on Friday morning, the team would have to catch a 10 a.m. flight to Anchorage. Getting to Juneau on the Pavlof is normally an eight-hour ride, but in headwinds, it could be 12 hours.
The weather forecast also looked potentially dangerous. Winds were gusting as high as 54 miles per hour at Eldred Rock halfway up the Lynn Canal, according to weather station data.
Crowe said he felt comfortable with his boat with winds up to 40. As they watched the weather station, the winds started to subside just enough to make a go for it. Crowe and the wrestling coaches put out the word to wrestlers, who wrangled their survival suits and left around 6 p.m.
Winds were still high and seas were crashing with up to eight-foot waves as the team passed by Eldred Rock around 2 a.m. At least one wrestler was seasick.
“It’s not the worst weather I’ve been in by any means, but not the kind of weather anyone wants to go boating in,” said Crowe.
But the vessel made it to Juneau safely after about 5:30 in the morning, nearly 12 hours after they’d left town.
They caught the jet to Anchorage and settled in for a light practice at the Alaska Airlines Center before grocery shopping and crashing at their hotel.
The whole ordeal grabbed statewide media attention when the wrestlers arrived in Anchorage, with full stories in the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska’s News Source, but Crowe said it didn’t feel like a big deal.
“There’s lots and lots of people that contributed way more than I did to get the kids through the wrestling season than I did,” he said. “It just reminds me of the Southeast Alaska I grew up in. It woulda been pretty tragic if the boys wouldn’t have been able to go. “
Tournament time
After weigh-ins, Haines athletes picked up where they left off on the mat, with almost every wrestler getting a pin in the first round, Hale said.
The team had been hyper-focused on high-point potential positions, like starting with the other wrestler on top of them and trying to get out of the position. Hale said despite the travel challenges, the team’s mindset was still ready for competition.
“Having that mindset gives confidence to the wrestlers. It’s not only that I’m gonna win, but I wanna win by a lot. It gives them that confidence,” he said.
The team continued to notch wins, even as the competition stiffened. Ultimately, no Haines wrestler placed lower than fifth.
The team was buoyed by a state champion in Dalton Henry, a 16-year-old junior.
In the final, he faced Ellis Johnson of Bethel, whom he hadn’t ever wrestled.
“I knew he was gonna be pretty fast and strong, but I didn’t fully know how strong,” said Henry.
Still, he said as soon as he got in the ring, he felt in control of the match, and managed two reversals from a lower position to take the win, 6-4.
Hale said that Henry had been exceptionally committed to off-season fitness this year. He ran cross country in the fall, and attended a summer wrestling camp in Idaho along with some teammates. Coming into the season, he started off slow, but by the time of the Bill Weise Tournament in early November, Henry showed he was championship potential by beating an opponent he’d previously lost to four times.
“He walked off Bill Weise and said, ‘I’m never losing to him again,”’ said Hale. “He really was a crescendo, he slowly started having more impressive matches.”
All eyes turned to senior Leo Wald for his final match again RJ Didrickson from Mount Edgecumbe in the 171-pound weight category. The two had faced off five other times this year, with Wald owning the 3-2 advantage, including most recently, a dominating win at regionals.
“These two just creamed everybody, any other year, those guys woulda just swept through the tournament,” he said.
Wald started off strong, avoiding the long reach of Didrickson’s arms. Four minutes into the match, the two were tied with four points each. In the final minutes, Didrickson nabbed two more points to take a narrow win.
“It was a fantastic match. This time around RJ Didrickson got the take down so Leo had to wrestle from behind,” said Hale. “That’s wrestling, though. Somebody’s got to win, and somebody’s got to lose.”
Hale said Wald showed incredible poise after his loss, calmly shaking Didrickson’s hand.
“He handled it with such grace, dignity, and respect for RJ. I was just so proud to be from Haines to see him act like that,” said Hale.
Hale said that even for wrestlers not shooting for championships, there were exceptional performances. He pointed to Colton Combs, a 135-pound wrestler who had recently taken up the sport. In his final match for fifth place, Combs faced an opponent, Kai Davis, who had dominated him earlier in the season. At one point, a match was called essentially a forfeit after Combs fell behind by more than 15 points. But over the last few tournaments, Combs started closing the gap. Hale said that Combs was ultra-focused on visualizing moves and analyzing videos of his opponents to learn their strengths and weaknesses. By regional championships, Combs had closed the gap to 6-1.
At state it was a different story. The two went toe-to-toe the entire match. Coming into the final seconds, Combs managed to score a point, taking the win for fifth place.
“It was an incredible thing to watch,” said Hale. “I can’t say enough for that young man and what he puts into the sport.”
Hale, for his part, was honored as the coach of the year for the outstanding success of Haines athletes this year. Fourteen spots are scored at the state tournament. Haines had just seven wrestlers, but still managed to come in second place overall. Henry said Hale’s leadership has been key to the team’s success.
“He’s been really good at pushing us harder than we did last year,” said Henry.
The team also received the sportsmanship award, which Hale said was one of the proudest moments of the tournament.
“That award totally reflects our community — how we respect people, how we treat people. I was just so proud of our team,” said Hale.
The team celebrated with a trip to Texas Roadhouse, where they were allowed to have soda, french fries, and other sweets that they’d been restricted from for months as they tried to keep weight during the season.
When the Allen Marine boat brought them into the harbor in Haines, Hale said all the wrestlers were sleeping and had to be woken up.
Henry, interviewed over the phone from his home a few hours after arriving in Haines, said he was looking forward to catching up on sleep, but had already been piling on the calories. His food of choice: Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.
