Haines High School senior James Stickler is hopping inside the center circle of wrestling mat number 2. It is one of 12 inside the Menard Center in Wasilla, where more than 1,100 wrestlers traveled from every corner of the state to compete in Alaska’s largest tournament last weekend.
Each mat tells a story but it always ends with one hand getting raised at the end of the match. Stickler does one final look over his gear and takes a deep breath while waiting for his opponent, a senior from a private wrestling academy in Fairbanks, Gage Runnels.
It’s the final match to determine who is the best at the 215-pound weight class of the 23rd annual Lancer Smith Memorial Tournament.
“He made it last year,” said Haines head coach Andus Hale.
Stickler opened the final with a near takedown on the edge, but when officials ruled them out of bounds, the moment slipped away and the match tilted. Runnels capitalized on a late first-period scramble and steadily widened the gap with reversals and turns as Stickler fought to stay in it. By the third period, exhausted but still firing, Stickler took neutral and went after him, drawing shouts from Hale — “You’ve got to go!” — from the corner. But a countered shot sealed the technical fall, ending the match at 17–2.
Stickler did not get his hand raised.
Afterward, Hale said he didn’t see the loss as a failure, but “a platform we’re going to use for the final push, where all the matches really matter.”
Stickler wasn’t the only Glacier Bear battling through the chaos of a tournament that seemed to swallow every mat in noise; several of his teammates carved out storylines of their own.
Freshman Luke Bell, wrestling at 103 pounds in the JV division, scrapped his way to a third-place finish, one of the strongest underclassman performances of the weekend. His cousin, Calvin Bell, followed that with a run to the 145-pound JV final, where he finished second—an effort Hale believed was good enough to win. “He really should have won that match,” Hale said, proud but already thinking about adjustments for December’s meets.
On the varsity side, sophomore Finn Crowe continued his steady rise at 112 pounds. Crowe put together an impressive early run, reaching the quarterfinals before facing Soldotna’s No. 2-ranked Division I wrestler. Crowe lost by just two points—a razor-thin margin against one of the toughest athletes in the bracket—before a lingering neck issue forced Hale to pull him for a medical default.
Senior Nolan Wald held his own in the 171-pound varsity bracket, wrestling with the poise of an experienced captain in a field packed with upper-division contenders. And though Stickler’s second-place finish carried the most emotional weight, Wald’s steadiness continued to anchor a lineup defined this year by freshmen, sophomores, and rebuilding energy.
But as the dust settled in the Mat-Su Valley, the bigger story wasn’t just how Haines wrestled – it was who this team is becoming.
Rebuilding
There are three freshmen, three sophomores, one junior, and two seniors who make up the Glacier Bears wrestling team.
“We’re rebuilding with two senior captains,” Hale said. “Which is kind of ideal really.”
Although Hale said the wrestlers are accomplished and experienced, there’s a lot of potential in this team, especially the freshmen.
“We have Makayla [Henry],” he said. Henry is a freshman and sister of two-time state champion Dalton Henry. “She doesn’t know this, but her work ethic, like her strength, her ability to learn so quickly, she’s going to come around and be tough to compete one day,” he said.
Because the Glacier Bears don’t have enough wrestlers to field a full lineup, Haines isn’t competing in dual meets this season. Instead, they rely entirely on tournaments – where individual matches carry extra weight and young wrestlers are thrown directly into deep brackets against opponents from every region.
This year also brought new headaches: the Alaska School Activities Association adopted a rule change that counts medical defaults as losses, a shift Hale said hurts smaller programs during seeding. Combined with bracketing glitches in the early-season Skagway tournament — where some wrestlers received losses for matches that were never wrestled — the team’s records don’t fully reflect how they’ve performed on the mat.
Still, the challenges haven’t changed the way Haines wrestles – if anything they’ve sharpened a team identity built on creativity, risk-taking, and a style Hale sums up in one word: fearless.
Fearless
Hale doesn’t hold back on what he teaches his student athletes. “We coach everything,” he said. The setup to a wrestling move is a recipe, the execution is a dish, and the wrestlers decide what to serve according to Hale. “I make a menu for these kids,” he said. “Show the menu, and then because everyone’s a different body type . . . the kids can pick and choose from them and develop their own style.”
This allows his wrestlers to create a game plan to fit their body type and personality. Hale said some of his peers find this methodology unconventional, preferring to teach six basic moves and drill them ad nauseum. “The kids get bored, you know?”
Some teams are catching on to this philosophy. “I’m happy to announce we’re starting to get copied,” Hale said. Teams like Wrangell are trying different moves. “Which I think is great.”
Hale believes that fearlessness isn’t something he teaches so much as something the kids bring with them. It’s an attitude bred from Haines landscape. Many of his wrestlers grew up climbing mountains on a whim, hunting after school, fishing on the weekends, or “swapping a truck transmission” before dinner, Hale said. That instinct to take on big, improbable tasks carries naturally onto the mat, where hesitation gets replaced by the kind of bold, improvisational wrestling Haines has become known for.
It’s a style that echoes what Glacier Bear teams have shown in recent years – an inventive, wide-open approach built from rural grit and a willingness to try what other programs shy away from.
But maintaining this identity takes more than technique – it takes navigating the kind of travel, school pressure, and emotional strain that comes with being a small Southeast program chasing big stages.
Small School Logistics
Getting in and out of Haines isn’t easy and is weather dependent. The team will compete on Friday at the Bill Weis Tournament in Ketchikan. Hale said they’ll leave Haines on Wednesday. But the wrestlers are students first, and that means homework. He spent the past Monday meeting with teachers to ensure everyone was eligible to compete. “With these long trips, they just don’t have access to WiFi where they can get their work in,” he said. So ensuring assignments are turned in on time can be challenging. “If they don’t meet the 2.0 or have an ‘F’, they can’t travel,” he said.
They had to skip a tournament or two due to the amount of time it takes to travel, so Hale said they’re looking forward to Thanksgiving break. “It’s going to be good,” he said. “We’ll get everybody in peak mode for the Region V Championship in Sitka.”
But beyond the logistics and late assignments, Hale is thinking about what kind of wrestlers – and people – his team will be when December arrives.
Region V will demand the best they’ve shown this season, and Hale believes they’re close. Stickler’s heartbreak in the Lancer Smith final, the flashes of brilliance from the Bells and Crowe, the long ferry rides and study halls – it all folds into a season defined not by ease, but by resilience. “We’re using every bit of this as a platform,” Hale said. “The matches that really matter are still ahead.”