Practice now pays off later for teams at camp

MATT NEVALA

June 12, 2008 at 10:13AM AKST

The bleachers inside the aging East Anchorage High School gymnasium are stacked against the wall, appropriate because no fans are in attendance to watch the Kotzebue girls’ basketball team take on Dimond.

The Huskies wear matching white jerseys trimmed in blue and gold, but the mismatched colors of shorts, socks and shoes tell a different story. Teams get their work in at the Northwest Basketball Camp, or NBC, just not in the uniformed style of the regular season.

This is high school basketball in June, played in the solitude of a near-empty gym but with an anticipatory eye towards games to be contested and won come winter time.

“We do the work now, and it will pay off down the road,” said Bethel coach Danielle Dizon.

Bethel and Kotzebue were two rural Alaska squads among the 21 total to take part in last week’s NBC girls’ team camp in Anchorage. The teams came from all over the state for four days of basketball intensives.

Bethel vs. Wasilla, Chevak vs. Petersburg, Newhalen vs. Grace Christian and Kotzebue against Dimond — the NBC camp acted as a sort of Alaska basketball summit full of players and programs that don’t often run on the same floor.

“These girls have never played teams like (Anchorage’s) Grace Christian or South. It’s good for them to get that kind of exposure,” Dizon said.

NBC has gone camping in Alaska for 26 years. It’s running multiple camps over a four-week period at different locations around Anchorage and the Mat-Su Valley.

NBC is headed by one-time University of Alaska Fairbanks coach Frank Crowell, who started the organization in Washington state in 1971. He held his first camp in Alaska in 1982.

Players at last week’s girls’ team camp were housed on the Alaska Pacific University campus. They practiced and played at the University of Alaska Anchorage, East High and Anchorage Christian School with NBC’s stable of college coaches and former players, many of whom acted as referees in the camp-ending mini tournament.

“And they’re good refs because they take the time to correct you on your mistakes,” said Margaret Anderson, who will be a senior at Chevak in the fall.

The camps featured full days of hardcore hardwood study and execution.

The daily schedules started with 7 a.m. wake-up calls. Campers ate breakfast and went through extended warm-up and ball-handling sessions by 9 a.m. They moved on to individual stations based on position play through the late morning and early afternoon before playing two to three games in the evening before and after dinner.

Days ended with motivational talks centered on the teaching of life skills, mixing them with basketball in hopes of making campers both successful athletes and students.
Teams were in bed by 11:30 each night.

NBC camps aren’t free. All teams paid to be there.

Anderson and Chevak teammate Martha Miles estimated the total cost of their week-long trip to Anchorage at $2,000 per person.

“We ask for a lot of funds and do a lot of the fundraising ourselves,” Anderson said.

The Comets were scheduled to fly home Sunday after spending time with family and friends once the camp ended. Anderson and Miles said they’d be spending free time playing hoops at home this time of year anyway, so the opportunity to come to NBC and face many of the state’s top programs was a no-brainer.

“It’s a real privilege for us,” Anderson said. “It helps us see where we rank.”

The camp also offered the chance for mingling between gym rats from all corners of Alaska.

“People think rural Alaskans, we’re the quiet ones,” said Miles, who will also be a Chevak senior in the fall. “But not once you get us in the gym.”

Dizon, who will begin teaching at Bethel Regional High School this fall, said the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp.’s Diabetes Prevention and Control Program sponsored the Warriors’ trip to NBC, paying the $3,500 camp fee for 10 players.

Dizon brought a young Bethel team with her. She said five of the girls on the trip will be freshmen in the fall, three will be sophomores and a couple will be seniors.

“It’s fortunate that we got to come because many of these girls have never competed against teams like the ones here,” Dizon said. “We’re also playing a different type of game.

“These tournament games (at the end of camp) only last 20 minutes. The girls learn how to play under pressure, how to watch the time and push the ball up and down the court.”

A few hours spent watching the final day of the NBC camp, and one thing was clear.

Basketball may very well be king in Alaska high school sports — or queen in this case.

“It’s one of the biggest sports in the Alaska, and we take a lot of pride in it in Bethel,” Dizon said. “It’s big in the Bush, kind of the main event.

“It’s going to be big for these girls to go back home and tell others they went to this camp. Despite whatever losses we had in games here, we gained so much. We’ll have much tougher players and a much tougher team when it’s time for the season.”

Matt Nevala can be reached at (907) 348-2480 or toll free at (800) 770-9830, ext. 480.