FROZEN FOOTBALL : Pigskins and polar bears
Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008
Mark Voss spends a
couple of months
each year near Horatio, relaxing with his family in their cozy summer cottage nestled in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains. The solitude offers Voss ample opportunity to clear his head, but it does seem a little odd he finds it here, beside the Little River in southwestern Arkansas. He isn’t trying to escape the hustle and bustle of some booming metropolis. Voss spends most of the year coaching high school football in Barrow, Alaska, a location far more isolated than any town in Arkansas.
The whale bone that hangs on the wall in his youngest son’s room and a small sign above the front door that reads “Arkansas Igloo” indicate Voss’ connection to Alaska, but other than that the summer home resembles most of the others in the neighborhood.
Nothing else would tip off a visitor that Voss, 48, is the head coach of the Barrow Whalers, the only high school football team in the Arctic Circle, or indicate the remarkable odds he has overcome to achieve success after starting the program just two years ago.
“I really had to think long and hard about it,” said Voss, who guided the Whalers to an 8-2 record and the semifinals of the small school state playoffs this year. “I didn’t think it would be something that would come naturally, but kids can’t wait for the next season to start. It’s the thing that keeps a lot of them interested in school.”
Barrow sits on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, just beyond the edge of the polar ice cap and well within the brutal confines of the Arctic Circle. A town of 4, 581 people, it is the northernmost city in the United States.
There are no paved roads. The average high temperature is below zero six months out of the year, and it generally remains under 50 degrees throughout the summer. The sun doesn’t set from May 10 to Aug. 2 and doesn’t rise from Nov. 18 until Jan. 24.
It’s not an environment conducive to outdoor sports, but Voss has found a way to make football work in a place hardly anyone thought it could.
“I’ve been in the Arctic a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of money spent,” said Voss, who grew up in Arkansas. “This is a thing, I think, that has made a lot of impact.” Sports aren’t a high priority for the people of Barrow, 64 percent of whom are either Inupiat Inuit natives or part native. Most are more concerned with just keeping up with the high cost of living and supporting an economy that relies heavily on hunting, fishing and oil drilling.
They are also struggling to keep the area’s educational system afloat. The high school dropout rate recently reached 52 percent — an escalation most in Barrow trace directly to a spike in drug use and crime. Voss and his staff started out at ground zero in 2006, introducing players to a game that was essentially foreign to them. “In Alaska, you’re dealing with isolation, yet you have TV and the Internet,” said Barrow defensive coordinator Brad Igou, who like Voss is a native of Arkansas and spends his summers in Bella Vista. “The kids think they have an idea of what life’s like in the lower 48 [states ], but they just don’t have the experience to draw from. They watch football on TV, but they don’t have any concept of what it’s like to put on the pads.”
BREAKING AWAY When Voss moved with his wife, Terri, from Arkansas to Alaska 23 years ago, coaching football wasn’t part of the equation.
Voss, who was born in Little Rock, played high school football at Camden and in college at Henderson State from 1978-1979.
He met Terri in college, and the couple moved to Glenwood, both accepting teaching positions at Caddo Hills High School in nearby Norman. Voss’ career as a football coach in Arkansas consisted of a two-year stint (1983-1984 ) as an assistant at Caddo Hills.
Terri’s sister and brother-inlaw were the first in the family to leave Arkansas for Alaska. They settled on Kodiak Island in southwestern Alaska and kept Mark and Terri apprised of their adventures. Voss was satisfied with his life in Arkansas, but he was seeking more financial freedom. “We were not getting anywhere economically,” Voss said. “You can make a lot of money in Alaska for jobs that would pay a little more than minimum wage in Arkansas.” Voss also was seeking a deeper type of fulfillment. “I had a lot of books on Alaska, a lot of stuff about hunting and fishing in Alaska,” he said. “Then, here comes an opportunity to make it happen. We were ready for a change.”
INTO THE WILD Voss was 24 when he and his family left Arkansas for Alaska in 1985. He spent the next 21 years teaching, building his family and exploring Alaska — apart from football.
The couple started out in tiny Anaktuvuk Pass, a Arctic town of 260 people in the same school district as Barrow. During his five years in Anaktuvuk Pass, Voss coached volleyball, cross country and boys and girls basketball at the school, which had only 90 students (K-12 ). Terri was his assistant on the girls basketball team.
They moved to Ahkiok, a town of fewer than 100 people about 700 miles away, in 1990 and spent two years there as the only teachers at an even smaller school that consisted of 33 students (K-12 ).
In 1992, the family traveled 900 miles back to the North Slope Borough District, finally settling in Barrow. By then, they had two small children and needed to be somewhere with a few more amenities than the lonely outposts where the family had spent its first seven years in Alaska.
The school had an athletic department, with its teams fittingly nicknamed the Whalers. It offered indoor sports like basketball, wrestling and volleyball, but there were no outdoor sports since any playing surface would consist mainly of rocks and gravel on top of permafrost.
Voss taught history, health and computer classes and coached intramural basketball. Then, in the spring of 2006, North Slope Borough Superintendent Trent Blankenship approached Voss with the idea of starting a football program.
It was a concept many in Barrow considered far-fetched, even absurd, but Voss was intrigued and eventually grew to believe that under the right circumstances, the plan might work.
Tensions were high in Barrow at the time.
Two high school students had been implicated in a drugrelated robbery that ended with the murder of a taxicab driver in late 2004. After a Barrow teacher was linked to the discovery of a meth lab, many residents grew distrustful of the school system and were in no mood to consider football as a way of solving their problems. Pro Football Hall of Fame running back Larry Csonka was the first of several notable personalities who contributed to the inception of the Whalers football program. As the host of an outdoors TV series called North to Alaska, Csonka came to Barrow in the spring of 2006 and delivered a motivational speech to the students at the high school. “He said that football turned his life around,” Blankenship said. “If it worked for him, why couldn’t it work for us ?”
SIGNING ON Csonka’s visit came at just the right time.
Blankenship conducted a student survey to determine which after-school activities were in greatest demand, and it indicated a substantial interest in football. The students were sold, but the community needed everyone else on board as well.
The potential costs of starting and maintaining a football program were sure to be overwhelming. Still, Blankenship knew something needed to be done quickly, and he felt compelled to lead the charge.
Opponents rattled off plenty of criticisms.
“We didn’t have a football field,” Blankenship said. “They came up with things like, ‘Inupiats don’t play football.’ ‘ I only did this so my son [Colton ] could play. ’ ‘It’s a violent sport.’ ‘ If we put all the money we’d spend on football into teachers’ salaries, test scores would go up. ’”
Undeterred, Blankenship started his campaign to create a team and get the Whalers on the field, somewhere, by summertime.
Blankenship, who had been there for only two years, needed help from someone more connected to the people in Barrow and to football.
In stepped Voss.
“I put out a call for volunteers, and he answered,” Blankenship said. “As soon as he volunteered, he was absolutely the man with the plan. “ He has a really easy way with kids. The whole idea was not to win games. It was getting kids engaged in school. Mark is just an expert at that.”
CAMPAIGN TRAIL Voss was apprehensive at first. After all, it had been more than 20 years since he coached football. Blankenship asked around to see if anyone had coaching experience, and Voss said no one replied. “I didn’t reply,” Voss said. “When he came by and talked to me, I said I’d be interested if there was interest with the kids.” A few days after accepting the proposal, Voss had his first football assistant in Jeremy Arnhart, Barrow’s boys basketball coach and another fellow Arkansan, from Paragould. He picked up a second assistant in Brian Houston.
Now, all Voss had to do was recruit enough players to field a team, find a place to play and help Blankenship convince the school board to appropriate the funds they needed.
Travel was the key concern. The Whalers would have to fly out for road games and arrange for opponents to be flown in for home games. One potential opponent, Sitka, would be traveling 1, 400 miles for a game in Barrow.
Ground transportation, food and lodging also had to be provided for each visiting team, adding up to about $ 20, 000 per home game. Travel expenses, equipment, field maintenance and all other costs ran the total estimate for the first year to approximately $ 200, 000.
It was an uphill battle, but it seemed that for every adversary they met, they were able to convince someone of influence the plan would work. North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta was among those. “At a time when people were vocally opposed, he was supporting it,” Voss said.
STARTING FROM SCRATCH About 40 athletes came out for the first practice. They were eager, but very inexperienced. It reminded Voss of helping Caddo Hills start its program 23 years earlier. “We won one game the first year at Caddo Hills and one game our second year,” Voss said. “I told the kids in Barrow, ‘You will be everybody’s whipping boy at first, and then you’ll get some wins under your belt.’
“ I knew the potential for heartache and disappointment, and I wanted them to know it.”
A diverse collection of athletes formed the first Whalers team in 2006. There were white athletes, black ones, Inupiat Eskimos, Thais, Samoans, Choctaws and some of mixed ethnicity.
Voss’ son Jake, a senior tight
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