newsminer.com

Ryan Rock wore his black and gold football jersey at Tikigaq High School in Point Hope on Thursday.

On Saturday, that jersey will be drenched in sweat because Rock will be playing quarterback for Point Hope against seven other teams in the first eight-man football games in Alaska.

“I want to have some fun with my friends in my senior year,’’ Rock said in a telephone interview.

Joining the Point Hope players on Barrow’s blue and gold field Saturday morning will be counterparts from Nuiqsut, Atqasuk, Wainwright, Point Lay, Anaktuvuk Pass, Kaktovik and Barrow’s Hopson Middle School. Some of the village high schools don’t have enough boys, so middle school players are allowed to compete, Fred Parady, activities director for the North Slope Borough School District, said recently.

Two games will be played simultaneously in each half of Barrow’s field and the teams will play each other in a jamboree-style format — 10 plays on offense and 10 plays on defense per team.

It’s not exactly the 50-yard style of football the Fairbanks Grizzlies engaged in this past season in the indoor Intense Football League.

There are no kickoffs, and each team starts on offense on the 40-yard line. Also, every player except the center is eligible to catch passes.

The inaugural season last only two weeks — this weekend and the weekend of Sept. 6 — and the North Slope Borough School District is helping fund eight-man football.

Planning for eight-man football above the Arctic Circle began last year.

“It’s born of the outgrowth from the (Barrow High School) Whalers football team,” Parady said. “We’ve been building forward in the budgeting process for the kids for this.”

The players from the villages have seen football on TV, and some have even watched Barrow High School’s games on its artificial turf field that sits 100 yards from the Arctic Ocean.

The school district, though, didn’t leave the eight-man football players to fend for themselves when it came to giving them a basic understanding of football.

Football University conducted a three-day camp during early April in Barrow, featuring former National Football League players Chris Miller, Andre Rison, Blair Thomas, Perry Williams and Irv Eatman among the instructors. The camp attracted 100 players from Barrow High School and the villages which will be playing the eight-man game on Saturday.

According to an Aug. 7 article in USA Today, Football University typically runs camps around the nation for elite players, but it decided to come to Barrow after Colton Blankenship, a junior two-way lineman for Barrow High School, attended one of its camps in Seattle this summer and struck up a conversation with Rich McGuinness, president of Sportslink, a New Jersey-based management, promotions and sports clubs company that owns Football University.

The FBU instructors waived their usual fees, and the North Slope Borough School District helped subsidize their airfare. The district is doing likewise for the eight-man teams from the villages.

Before he left with his teammates today from Point Hope, senior wide receiver Jeremy Tooyak also wore his black and gold jersey to school Thursday.

Tooyak’s father played high school football, and Jeremy was reluctant to give it a try until he participated in the Harpooners’ first practice three weeks ago.

“I wasn’t going to join,” he said, “but after I went (to practice), I got addicted to playing football. It felt good putting on all the equipment and just catching the ball, and having fun.”

The team has practiced in the high school gymnasium because there is no field in Point Hope, which has sponge-like tundra, and the nearby beach mostly has rocks, which can lead to ankle injuries when football players are trying to cut and turn.

Long before he became the first head coach of eight-man football in Point Hope, Gary Lamar worked on the coaching staffs of five high school programs in Texas, where football is like a religion.

“It’s been quite an experience here,” Lamar said. “Basketball is king all over north Alaska and I came from a place where football was the thing, and everyone in Texas knows that.

“But it’s been great being in a sport (eight-man football in Point Hope) that’s not necessarily, not absolutely a live-or-die situation. It’s a live-or-die situation when you coach football in Texas.’’

Lamar, 48, coached from the Class 1A to 3A levels in Texas at Emarathon, Billey, Mexia, Aguadulce and Refugio.

His longest tenure was at Emarathon, where he was head coach from 1984-95 and worked with an average of 45 players a year. By comparison, he’s working with 14 in Point Hope.

The players in Point Hope didn’t grow up playing football like many kids in Texas do, but Lamar, like Rock and Tooyak, is having fun with his new gig.

“These kids have got to be the greatest kids I’ve ever coached,” said Lamar, who also coaches co-ed volleyball and teaches history and physical education at Tikigaq. “They’re good kids, they’ve got wonderful attitudes and they’re very respectful.”

Lamar had to teach the Harpooners players everything from putting their pads in their uniform pants to proper stances. His tutoring was easy, thanks to Point Hope boys basketball head coach Rex Rock Sr., who’s Ryan’s father and the husband of Ramona Rock, the high school’s athletic director.

Nine of the Point Hope players are also members of the Harpooners’ basketball team.

“The gentleman who coaches the boys basketball team,” said Lamar, “has done a very good job in helping these young men be a success in not only the way they play basketball, but the way they dress, the way they act and the way they respond to discipline. You can tell someone did a lot of molding here.”

Parady said there are plans for each village to have its own 50-yard field for eight-man football.

Lamar would like to see the sport go beyond the schools above the Arctic Circle and to other parts of the state.

“We want to make this a big deal in Alaska and get more teams,” he said. “You can have a field that’s 40-by-80 (yards) and you don’t have to have as many players when you go to a smaller field. It’s a more wide-open game.”

And just as physical — if not more — as the 11-man, 100-yard field game, in which 31 Alaska high schools participate.

“The hitting can be so much harder because there’s so much open space,” Lamar said. “By the time (a defender) gets to them (offensive player), he’s built up a lot of speed.”

The players in Point Hope are not built like most of the players at Barrow High School, which includes linemen in the 300-pound range.

Ryan Rock, for example, is 6-foot-1 and 178 pounds, and Tooyak is 6-0, 150.

The Harpooners, though, are big in other ways.

“They’re average kids with above-average hearts,” Lamar said. “Each of them is the average kid with a no-quit attitude and the average kid with an unbelievable sense of success and opportunity.”

CAMPUS TRAILS: Michigan volleyball head coach and East Anchorage graduate Mark Rosen carries a 372-160 career record into this weekend’s season-opening Rice Invitational in Houston, Texas. Rosen has coached at the collegiate level for 16 years — nine with Michigan, one with Boise State, four with Northern Michigan and two with California State Bakersfield.