At the MidCoast League Basketball Tournament in Eek, the gym is loud – just like coastal basketball tournaments always are.
It’s the familiar soundscape of a village league tournament — stomps and claps, collective hushing as the ball soars towards the hoop. Among the noise are cheers for the Kipnuk and Kwigillingok teams, but no one traveled from those communities to be here today.
Student Curtis Dock Jr. plays for the Kipnuk boys team. His family was evacuated to Anchorage after the storm.
“When we got here, I think we forgot how to dress up in a village way because we're mostly in the city,” Dock Jr. said.
Back in his home region, about 100 miles from his village, he said it’s a breath of fresh Delta air.
“It feels lighter than Anchorage,” Dock Jr. said.
Kwigillingok, a community that also evacuated after the storm, has a boys and girls team based out of Bethel. The Kipnuk boys and girls teams, though, reformed out of displaced students who now attend Anchorage high schools, where more students from their community were evacuated to. There, the boys are part of student bodies three times the size of their hometowns.
'Village life is freedom'
In the city, they take a bus to and from practice. They aren’t able to roam free in the way they can in the village, where nearly everyone is known and there are no cars in sight.
When it’s time for basketball practice, though, the boys come back to a familiar group of nine.
"I think most of them are missing village life because village life is freedom,” said Kipnuk boys coach Jesse Igkurak. He said that the Eek tournament is the first time back on the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta since the storm for many of the boys.
“When we got here, a snowmachine passed by, and a lot, a lot of the boys were like,” Igkurak mimed taking a deep breath in. “The smell of the snowmachine was just refreshing.”
Igkurak’s family has a home in Anchorage, but he spends nine months of the year back in the village because that’s where his son, Dallas, wanted to go to school and play sports. A few weeks before the storm, Dallas passed away at 15.
Igkurak said that right after the typhoon, he heard a lot of people talking like Kipnuk and Kwigillingok didn’t exist anymore. It didn’t sit right with him, especially thinking about his son’s basketball teammates.
“I didn't want all the students to think, not to think like this, what if? What if? What if Halong didn't hit us? We'd be playing, right?” Igkurak said.
When the district asked Igkurak to coach the Kipnuk boys team, he said that he was hesitant. Being from Kwigillingok, he didn’t know what the boys would think. But now, it’s hard to imagine life without the team.
“I always tell them, if you guys weren't there for me to coach, I don’t know where I would be today,” Igkurak said. “You guys always give me strength to look forward for the next day.”
Igkurak said that he’s been able to see Dallas in them — a kid who was kind to everyone and loved basketball. And he’s been able to help the boys adjust, moving through their own grief of being displaced from their homes.
To keep what might be lost
Billy Strickland is the executive director of the Alaska School Activities Association (ASAA).
“The reality of a lot of our small school kids going into what's probably the largest high school in the state — super competitive boys basketball program, state championship last couple years,” Strickland said. “You know, the reality is some of these kids would not have made those teams.”
Strickland said that the ASAA spoke with schools that had been impacted by the wildfires in California when looking at options for the displaced communities, finding out how they were able to give back an experience that was assumed to be lost.
After the students chose to play this season as their village teams, an idea emerged to bring the students together in a Y-K Delta tournament. It would be a way to bring everyone together, but also allow the Kipnuk teams to qualify for regionals, and from there, possibly state.
Strickland taught in Kipnuk early in his career where he coached the basketball team. He said that he found out he coached some of the Kipnuk students' grandfathers, which made him feel old. It was a time when the school was being built and they didn’t even have a gym.
“We had one basket we hung up in the, kind of the Arctic entry of the school that we're in that let you at least practice a free throw,” Strickland said.
On the Y-K Delta, basketball has a reputation of persisting despite challenges. The tournament was rescheduled to Eek days before the tournament following water line issues at the original site. When a blizzard canceled flights, one team bundled up and trekked to Eek by way of a snowmachine caravan.
There is a lot that Y-K Delta communities do for the sport, because there’s a lot that the sport does for them. It’s a way to gather and has been a generational staple of social and cultural fabric in some of the state’s most rural communities.
Not home, but closer to it
For the Kipnuk team today, even though basketball is still happening, it looks very different. To make the season work, the Kipnuk team — which has nine players total — was slotted into the Junior Varsity (JV) bracket of the 4A league — the division with the largest schools in the state, with tryouts and A, B, and C teams. Igkurak said that they’re up against teams with large rosters. Their goal each game was to get just 10 points on the scoreboard. He had to teach them that they were still learning something, even from tough games.
“Everything is so new to them. Big School, big gym, with bleachers all around,” Igkurak said. “And when we got [to Eek] on their first game, the stands are full with the people that can speak our native tongue.”
Igkurak said that when they played their first game in Eek, he could see this kind of shocked the boys, that suddenly there was an audience they knew.
Adrienne Kiunya has a daughter on the Kwigillingok (Kwig) team, which is based out of Bethel Regional High School.
“After the typhoon happened, this is like one big, happy family for us,” Kiunya said. “Seeing Kipnuk and Kwig people, it's happiness.”
Kiunya said that having the basketball team while displaced has had a positive impact on her daughter.
“I could see so much motivation because they look forward to practice. Not only for basketball, it was for [Native Youth Olympics], it was for volleyball, it was for basketball,” Kiunya said. “And now we're here. We are here now.”
Kiunya said that it feels normal to be in Eek. She kept forgetting that she didn’t come there from Kwigillingok.
Together as Falcons
However, life on the other side of the tournament still looks different. Dock Jr. said that his family will be moving out of the hotel they’ve been in since the storm.
“We, my family finally got an apartment yesterday. And I’m excited to see it,” Dock Jr. said.
Dock Jr. said that he’s excited to live with his puppy again, who’s been in foster care while his family was living in a hotel. He said that it’s been good to be back here and play in their 1A home division, even though things are different now.
“It doesn't feel the same because of that typhoon. It changed our life,” Dock Jr. said. He smiled over at his teammates, who started to giggle. “But these guys are laughing.”
At the MidCoast tournament, it’s clear these things live together — the big truths, and the simple fact of being a teenager and loving basketball. It’s something they’ve been able to navigate together, though. Not just as a team, but as Kipnuk Falcons.
