Alaska Anchorage Ignores Cold, Keeps On Winning

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The snow was piled so high in the back of the parking lot outside the gym of the Wells Fargo Sports Complex it was already beginning to resemble 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America.

Comes with the territory in the 49th state and if the formidable mound of white intimidated a potential University of Alaska Anchorage recruit, then he was in the wrong place to play college basketball.

The perennial NCAA Division II power can offer many perks, but warm weather and beaches aren’t among them. It takes the right sort of guy to play hoops in the Far North, someone who doesn’t flinch when the thermometer dips below zero, the white stuff piles higher than a 6-foot-5 forward’s eye level, and who doesn’t moan about homesickness because family is an hours-long jet flight away.

Such players with skill and the proper outlook do exist and Seawolves coach Rusty Osborne has been weeding them out from wannabes for 21 years, eight as Alaska Anchorage head coach and 13 as an assistant.

“We’re going to get snow in October and it will stay until March,” Osborne said recently. “If that bothers you, this is probably not for you.”

Those who take a look on a recruiting visit are often surprised at the breadth of Anchorage, a modern city of more than 290,000 people nestled between the Chugach Mountain Range and Cook Inlet, a beautiful setting amidst 5,000-foot peaks and picturesque water. Alaska may be America’s Last Frontier, and Anchorage may be 1,500 miles north of Seattle, but it is not a Wild West outpost.

Osborne’s ability to choose the right players keeps UAA winning, toppling Division I teams annually in its legendary Great Alaska Shootout, and being perennially ranked in Division II—currently 22nd.

“There was a tradition set early,” Osborne said. “We expected to win.”

Osborne, 48, originally from Texas, was 134-77 in his first seven seasons, with a 29-6 group that reached the Division II Final Four in 2008, and with a fresh group that won 24 games last season. The Seawolves are 5-2 this season, with both losses to Division I teams in the Thanksgiving weekend Shootout.

Once the only pre-season holiday tournament, the Shootout has been the cornerstone of the Alaska Anchorage program, focusing the spotlight on the little-school David’s attempts to upend Goliaths since 1978. Almost every year the Seawolves make news by besting one of the seven larger schools. Among the victims have been Wake Forest, Missouri, Texas Christian, Washington, and Notre Dame.

UAA has had just six head coaches in program history. Bob Rachal, who founded the Shootout, was boss for one season and is the only one with a losing record, 16-18. Gary Bliss coached three years and went 44-41.

Since Bliss gave way to assistant coach Harry Larrabee in 1981, all of the Seawolves’ coaches are linked. Larrabee left for Division I Southwest Texas State after five years. When the animated coach’s squad took down Missouri on national TV broadcaster Dick Vitale anointed him “Dancin’ Harry.”

Larrabee was succeeded by his assistant, Ron Abegglen, who took UAA to the Final Four for the first time and then departed for Division I Weber State. Larrabee returned for two years—bringing Osborne–and was succeeded by his top assistant, Charlie Bruns, who coached the team for 11 years. Osborne took over in 2003 and in 34 NCAA seasons, Alaska Anchorage’s winning percentage is .623.

Lee Piccard, 77, the retired vice chancellor who supervised athletics, and has witnessed every Shootout game in person, said coaching continuity is a big reason for the long-term success.

“It has to be,” Piccard said. “We’ve had very good coaches. They all fit and they all got along in the community. They all start in the program and they all move up.”

Piccard said the coaches have the knack to pinpoint the right kind of talent, the players who are more mature and who won’t be fazed by long, cold, dark winters.

“They understand the life that’s here,” he said. “They recruit students that fit.”

Icy streets, snow piled high, 20 hours of daily darkness in late December, and the occasional hurricane-force wind ripping shingles off roofs, wear down even the most resilient, however.

“Oh, I complain about the weather,” Piccard said, laughing.

The old hoops adage that the gym is always warm is relevant in this situation, less as cliché, but more importantly as reality. No one gets frostbite inside the Sports Complex.

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This Thanksgiving the Seawolves picked off their annual holiday turkey by beating the Anteaters of the University of California-Irvine. Sportscasters far away who do not differentiate between D-I programs shake their heads and say, “How do they keep doing it?” of UAA’s regular triumphs against bigger schools.

It may be generally conceded that D-I teams are stocked with taller, faster players, but not every single D-I school is better than every single D-II team on a given night.

“I don’t think it was that big of a stretch for us to win the other day,” Osborne said shortly after the Seawolves’ Shootout victory. “There certainly are some upsets.”

Such as the time UAA bested Wake Forest, 70-68, in 1993. Or the 88-82 overtime win over Notre Dame in 1998.

“The No. 1 highlight for me by far was when we beat Wake Forest when they had Tim Duncan,” said former UAA guard Bryan Anderson, 40, who finished his college play in 1994.

The future pro all-star Duncan was a freshman and not yet a regular, but that’s how good the Demon Deacons were that year.

Anderson grew up in Anchorage watching Shootout games with his family. More recently he spent 12 years doing Seawolf radio commentary. While UAA recruits every top-flight Alaska player, many choose Outside colleges to see a different part of the country. Anderson went to Southwest Texas State at first, but returned. Several other Alaskans have followed the same pattern.

They discover there is Division I, as in Duke, Indiana, and UCLA, and there is Division I, as in mid-majors, which aren’t on TV all of the time and take buses to away games. UAA offers special attractions, flying everywhere, out of necessity, and frequently plays in Hawaii. And until the match-ups were reclassified as exhibition games, Alaska Anchorage was regularly the only D-II team invited to D-I tournaments, reciprocal arrangements for Shootout appearances.

Over the years, the Alaska media has covered UAA as if it was a big-time program. There is no Division I basketball in the state and there are no major professional teams in any sport.

“It’s the only game in town,” Piccard said. “Anchorage has hockey, but the rest of Alaska has basketball. The Bush (small Alaska villages located off the road system) plays a lot of basketball. Hockey is local. This team has been representative. They win. Everybody knows you.”

Basketball is king in the Bush, where only a few high schools field football teams, and any school with five boys enrolled plays hoops. It is colder, darker and snowier in the tiny communities dotting the Great Land’s northern reaches where whaling is a time-honored activity, where houses are fortified against the winds of the Arctic Ocean, and where minus-40 temperatures are not unusual.

Much of Alaska’s indigenous population, the Inupiat and Yupik Eskimos, the Athabascan Indians, are scattered across the North, with other Indian tribes such as the Tlingit, located in the Southeastern panhandle. Amongst these people, estimated to date back 10,000 years in Alaska, subsistence lifestyles revolving around hunting and fishing remain common.

Still, one of the most popular winter recreational pursuits is basketball. The high school players are local celebrities and everyone, including village elders, stream to the gym on frigid weekend nights.

Out of this environment came one of Alaska Anchorage’s most remarkable success stories.

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When Butch Lincoln was a boy in Kotzebue in Northwest Alaska the coach of the high school basketball team was Charlie Bruns. Lincoln’s mother worked for Bruns at the school.

By the time Lincoln was a teenager, Bruns was at UAA. By the time Lincoln was a senior, he was an All-State guard, a passing wiz, though standing just 5-7. An excellent student, too, Lincoln’s heart was with the Seawolf basketball team, but he considered an appointment to Army or Navy.

In the 1980s, Derek Ahgeak and Manny Wrase were walk-ons at UAA, the first Natives on the team. They did not play much, nor did they stick around for four years. When Lincoln became the first Alaska Native to be offered a full scholarship in 1992, he said he wanted it to be more than “just a gesture.”

His signing was big news around Alaska.

“I wanted it for myself, for my family, and the community of Kotzebue,” Lincoln, 37, said in a recent interview. “I wanted it to be a two-way connection. In the end it was a win-win for both sides.”

When Lincoln took the court for the first time in the fall of 1993 there were noticeably more Natives in the stands and Lincoln was applauded when he merely dribbled or caught a pass.

“It was kind of embarrassing to me on some levels,” Lincoln said. “I wanted to contribute. I was eager to get past the novelty stage.”

After red-shirting as a sophomore, Lincoln did so, becoming the regular point guard who could pump in 3-point jumpers, as well.

Over the years UAA has played the occasional regular-season game in a remote corner of the state where college ball was never before accessible. The Seawolves have played home games in Barrow and Kotzebue, The Kotzebue game Lincoln’s senior year was unforgettable for the hospitality shown by residents, for his high school No. 12 jersey being retired, and as a timely thank-you to Lincoln from the university.

“That was one of the highlights of my career,” Lincoln said. “It was coming full circle. I was able to come home and close the loop. It was about all of the people who helped me.”

Lincoln later earned an MBA at Duke. He is married, with two sons, living in Anchorage, and is chief financial officer of Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, one of the largest Native-operated business entities in the state.

Lincoln’s career is an example of how UAA has frequently built teams with recruits who are not on national scouting lists.

As far back as 1983, a 17-year-old German, still growing into his 6-10 body, came to UAA. Decades later Hansi Gnad is still the school’s all-time top rebounder. By his senior year he was a first-team All-American. Although a late cut by the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, Gnad represented his country in the Olympics and had a long career in Europe.

Peter Bullock, a four-year player out of East High ending in 2004, is the all-time leading scorer with 1,902 points and still plays professionally in Europe.

One of the easiest recruits UAA ever signed was Scott Larrabee. Like Anderson, Larrabee was a star at Anchorage’s Dimond High. Unlike Anderson, Larrabee never wanted to play anywhere else.

When Scott’s father Harry first coached the Seawolves the youngster was a 5-year-old water boy. Around the team since he was a toddler, when he came out of high school in 1997 the only place Larrabee wanted to be was across town at UAA.

“My mother tells me that I was on the bench when I was 3 ½,” said the younger Larrabee, 33, who now coaches a girls high school team in Whiteland, Indiana. “They seemed like superstars to me. I was idolizing them. I wanted to play for my dad.”

By the time Larrabee graduated, though, his father was the school’s athletic director. But he was close to Bruns and Osborne, too.

“There was no discussion about it,” Larrabee said. “That’s where I wanted to go and they wanted me.”

Larrabee was on the team that beat Notre Dame.

“I know the history of UAA the giant killer,” Larrabee said. “And knowing the history, it was so special.”

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Twice the Seawolves have reached the Division II Final Four. The first time was 1988, the year after Gnad and slippery shooting guard Jessie Jackson (school-record 27.1 ppg.) were both first-team All-Americans. UAA lost in the championship game, 75-72, to University of Massachusetts-Lowell.

The second time, in 2008, UAA advanced to the one-site Elite Eight and bested California of Pennsylvania, 56-53, before losing in the semifinals to Augusta State. That year Carl Arts and Luke Cooper were both All-Americans. With 880, Cooper is the school’s all-time assists leader.

Arts, 26, is third on the all-time scoring list with 1,544 points, is third in rebounding, and still lives in Anchorage. The 6-6 forward’s jersey was just retired during the 2011 Shootout.

Like Lincoln, Arts was a small-schools Alaska player with talent. From Valdez, a community of 4,200 people 300 road miles from Anchorage, and the snowiest community in the United States, he desperately sought to get noticed outside the state by attending summer camps and sending out highlight videos and letters to coaches.

Some NAIA schools were intrigued. Arts received letters back from Michigan and Oregon State saying he could walk on.

“I thought, ‘Maybe if your schools were a little cheaper,’” Arts said.

Valdez High advanced to the Alaska state tournament four times and won two 3A titles during Arts’ stay, so University of Alaska Fairbanks, where his sister attended college, was also on his trail. But he preferred UAA.

Neither Arts nor UAA recognized he would become one of the finest players in school history. When he wasn’t scoring points, Arts laughed at players who sat in their dorm rooms fretting about winter. He told them they didn’t know how lucky they were that they weren’t in Valdez, which averages 326 inches of snow annually.

When Arts was honored by having his No. 34 jersey retired, his parents, two sisters from California, and wife Sarah were present.

“It was very cool,” he said.

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Each year Alaska Anchorage begins the season with the same goals. Besides making a splash in the Shootout the Seawolves seek the Great Northwest Athletic Conference and a berth in the Division II playoffs.

Widespread injuries have slowed this team’s start—Osborne said he really doesn’t know how good this bunch can be—but there are some familiar types on the roster.

Over the years, UAA has become a second home for Division I transfers who believed they made a mistake with their first choice. Many are Alaskans coming home, but many are not. Taylor Rohde, a 6-9 all-league center, is from Arizona and spent two seasons at Arizona State before becoming Alaska Anchorage’s 2010-11 leading scorer at 16.1 ppg.

Stunned hot-weather family members figured Rohde had lost his mind going to Alaska to live in an igloo and drive a dog-sled team where it was always minus-35. He chuckled at the clichés.

“I wasn’t intimidated,” Rohde said. “Weather doesn’t really bother me.”

That’s what Osborne likes to hear.

In recent years, Osborne has attracted a stream of Australians to Alaska, too. Point guard Steve White of Manly, Australia, near Sydney, is the younger brother of former guard Kevin White, who completed his eligibility in 2010.

For White, it is a 15-hour plane ride home to a place that gets “zero” snow.

“It’s an experience,” said White. “If I wasn’t here I don’t think I’d ever have been to Alaska.”

Sophomore guard Colton Lauwers is yet another former Dimond High standout. Fitting a common profile, Lauwers played a season for Adams State in Colorado, and then returned home. Now his father, Brad, a former prominent high school coach, is acting as a volunteer assistant for the Seawolves.

“Friends and family get to watch me,” Colton Lauwers said.

Like Scott Larrabee, Lauwers has been coming to the Sports Complex since he was a small child. His mother Kim coached the UAA volleyball team in the very same building where he now plays college basketball.

“I was running around here when I was young,” Lauwers said.

And he still is, these days with “Alaska Anchorage” written across the front of his jersey.