Season kickoff — Youth comp league soccer springing into action

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Come this weekend, about 150 Kenai Peninsula kids will kick off a rite of passage for spring, even if there is still snow on the ground.

It’s soccer season, ushered in by Kenai Peninsula Soccer Club tryouts Friday and Saturday at the Kenai Central High School gym. The club soccer program is a more competitive level of play than recreation leagues, and it isn’t affiliated with school sports programs so the season lasts longer into the summer, from April into August. It’s for ages 9 through 18 on 11 local teams. Teams practice or play games at least four days a week during the summer, and travel to tournaments in Anchorage and Fairbanks two or three times a summer.

It is a time commitment, but one that is well-rewarded, said Paul Ostrander, coach of the under-13 girls team Riptide and KPSC board member.

“It allows kids that maybe want to play at a more competitive level than, say, rec leagues available around here, to travel around the state and play against other comp teams. There’s a great amount of soccer skills that they gain, and I think that playing competitively and committing to something like this can really build up a kid, too. For example, my oldest daughter. I think it’s done wonders for her self-confidence and ability to compete, not only in athletics, but in school, as well,” Ostrander said.

Shelby Daly, a senior at KCHS, has been playing comp league soccer since she was in sixth grade and now is trying out for soccer teams at college next year, either at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., Corban College in Salem, Ore., or Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Wash. She said she’s enjoyed the level of play and the opportunity to travel.

“In comp soccer you go out there and try to win. It’s a way to keep pushing yourself to be a better player,” she said. “I really like the traveling and getting to become friends with people in other cities. That’s really been enjoyable.”

Daly’s played volleyball and basketball, as well, but neither have the appeal of soccer. Volleyball is a mental game, she said, with too much sitting around waiting and analyzing, and basketball can also be restrictive in where you go and what you do.

“With soccer you can make it up as you go. You can fix it and kind of take the game into your own hands and it’s not so back and forth, like basketball,” she said.

That aspect of the game probably has a lot to do with why soccer is growing in popularity on the peninsula, Ostrander said.

“When it comes to match time it’s really on the players. There’re no timeouts in soccer. The coach has very little control during matches, other than subbing,” he said. “I think kids like the fact that it’s more independent. In soccer, it’s up to them. It really generates creativity on their part. It’s very free-flowing and kids need to understand what’s going on and they need to react to what the game gives them. It’s a very different type of game than the others.”

That may be a foreign concept to people who grew up in the area, since soccer hasn’t been around for all that long.

“If they grew up around here there wasn’t really soccer, so people have a hard time understanding what the appeal is, but the kids, they absolutely love soccer if they play it and get involved. It’s just something they love to do,” Ostrander said.

This season promises a unique chance for players to improve their love and aptitude for the game. Ostrander said the KPSC is bringing a coach up from Georgia with an A license — the highest level attainable — for six weeks this summer to work with all the teams. Chas Frisco was here last year and worked with the program, and since then has gone on to bump his B license up to an A, which makes the opportunity even more exciting for local teams, Ostrander said.

“It was really good. Several teams really could see a huge benefit,” Ostrander said. “The kids reacted to him very well. Personally, I could see a huge benefit from the time he spent with the team. And it really helps our coaches out, they learn so much just by observing him coach the kids. The coaches glean so much from his time and some of the techniques and things he’s stressing continue on after he’s gone.”

To Ostrander’s knowledge, this is the first time the area will see an A-licensed coach.

“He knows the specific skills that the kids need to learn to really get their game to the next level,” he said.

From Aug. 9 to 15, KPSC teams will have a chance to display their skills to local soccer fans and the larger comp league community as the central peninsula hosts the comp league state tournament.

Kenai hosted the state tournament in 2007, which brought an estimated 1,500 people to the area.

“It was a huge undertaking for the club at the time, but all the reports from 2007 was it was a great success and very well run,” Ostrander said. “For 2009 to happen a ton of stuff needs to occur. We’re always looking for people willing to volunteer and help out. It’s a 100 percent volunteer effort. There’s an amazing amount of work that needs to go into it.”

As with club participation overall, there’s benefits to the commitment.

“It’s a huge deal for kids to be able to sleep in their own beds have that home field advantage that you enjoy,” Ostrander said.

On a roll — Peninsula Strikers gets kids bowling for life

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Tasha Waterbury hefted her ball Saturday at AlaskaLanes in Kenai and paused for a moment, eyeing the lane in front of her over the shiny, spherical bulk in her hands.

The Soldotna High School junior was a brief moment of motionlessness in the sea of activity around her: waves of bowlers shuffling back and forth from ball returns to lanes, launching their shots in a whirl of limbs and slide of shoes, pins ricocheting into each other, parents retrieving the youngest competitors from whatever diversion caught their attention and depositing them back in their seats to await their turn to bowl.

When Tasha moved it was in one fluid motion, her feet gliding up to the line, arm swinging back then down, ball transferring from fingers to floor without any arc or bounce, just a solid thud of impact giving way to the almost electric-sounding hum of the ball in its near-frictionless slide down the lane toward a crash landing at the end.

It’s taken Tasha nine years to get to that point. She’s been doing youth league bowling since she was in second grade. Her progress was represented in the difference between her lane and the next one over, where 6-year-old Ginni Orth lugged her ball up to the line and chunked it down with all the bend and flex of Frankenstein.

Had she not been tromping forward at the time, it’s questionable what direction the ball would have gone in. As it was, it loped into the gutter, at which point Ginni pirouetted around and skipped back to her friends.

Everybody’s got to start somewhere. With the Peninsula Strikers youth bowling league, the idea is to start a lifelong love of bowling.

“Bowling is one of those things, usually if you do it when you’re young, you do it for the rest of your life,” said Kathy Waterbury, an organizer of youth league bowling on the central Kenai Peninsula.

Waterbury had Tasha start bowling when she was 7.

“It started out to be something to do on a Saturday morning, something fun to get them involved. And it has turned into a passion,” Waterbury said.

Tasha remembers bowling for the first time, and her mom asking if she liked it.

“I thought it was just for the day. I enjoyed it and kept on doing it,” she said.

An interest in basketball and soccer came and went, since Tasha doesn’t like team sports, she said. Now bowling is her sport, and could get her thousands of dollars in scholarships.

“It’s fun and it can be relaxing if you’re stressed,” she said.

“It’s nice for these kids who may not necessarily be able to or want to participate in the footballs or basketballs,” Waterbury said. “It’s nice for them to have a sport they can call their own. Bowling gives them something to do and keeps them off the streets.”

The Peninsula Strikers is a youth league for ages 4 to 21 that draws 40 to 50 bowlers each year, Waterbury said. They bowl Saturdays at AlaskaLanes from fall to spring. Bowlers compete against each other to accumulate points, and the winners go on to bowl in a state tournament.

“Last year we did very well,” Waterbury said. “There’s some really good bowlers here in this league. When you think you’re competing against Anchorage, which is such a bigger pool of bowlers, but we held our own, which is awesome.”

Scholarship money is available at the local and state tournament level. Anyone is welcome to join the league, whether they’ve bowled for years or never set foot on a lane before.

“I think it starts out as a fun thing for them to do to have a sport activity, something to go to,” Waterbury said. “They get into it because they want to have fun and it just kind of becomes a part of their lives. They then can move on, participate in tournaments, there’s scholarship money available — it kind of grows on them.”

The local high school club bowling program started three years ago, after the Waterbury family moved back to the area from Washington, where Tasha participated in high school bowling.

Waterbury said she wanted to start a high school league here so Tasha and other kids with the same interest had more opportunities to bowl. They practice Wednesdays and Fridays, and many also participate in the youth league. There’s also a youth-adult bowling league in the area.

The high school league has seven members and is acknowledged by the schools, with SoHi even featuring their bowlers in its yearbook last year, Waterbury said. But it isn’t a school district-sponsored sport. Waterbury hopes to eventually grow the program to that point. For now, though, it’s more about fun.

“I want the kids to enjoy a sport, and it’s all about the kids — that’s how I look at it,” Waterbury said.

Dollie Nicholson signed up her son, John, for Peninsula Strikers in September for just that reason. On Saturday, the 8-year-old showed he was getting the hang of things.
“He’s getting better,” Nicholson said. “He just tends to curve.”

John’s shots veered left, but sometimes not until after the ball made it to the pins.
“It’s hard to throw them and get them in the lane,” he said.

His aim was improving, as was his bowling vocabulary.

“It’s hard to get the balls into the gutter — well, not the gutter, but the score place,” he said.

His enthusiasm was plenty developed. After just over a month of bowling, the sport already ranked pretty high in his world view.

“It’s more fun than playing video games and watching TV and shooting stuff at my brother,” he said.

Anyone interested in joining the Peninsula Strikers can contact Waterbury at 262-7449 or 398-8813.

“All they have to do is give me a call. They can start that day,” she said. “We make it as easy as we can because we want the kids to bowl.”

Good citizens in training — Animal program has youth facility residents teaching, learning

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Walk. Sit. Heel. Trust. Communicate. Be generous with praise and support. Don’t get frustrated.

The commands were meant to train the dogs Kenai Chief Animal Control Officer Patricia Stringer and her nine new assistants were working with Aug. 22. But the context of the chain-link fence and stark concrete walls of the Kenai Peninsula Youth Facility, where Stringer’s assistant trainers were held in custody, gave the instructions a larger relevance in the trainers’ lives.

“When training a dog to walk on a leash, it’s important to talk to her. If you talk softly and quietly with her, she’ll be fine,” Stringer said.

Stringer’s brown animal control uniform stood out among the sea of blue youth facility garb, and her quick, sure movements in interacting with the dogs highlighted the more reserved, self-conscious approach of the students.

“She actually put her hands on him and praised him for doing a good job. That’s what you should be doing,” Stringer said, offering praise to a trainer who gave positive reinforcement to the dog she was training.

“It’s much better to be where you need to be and doing what you should be doing,” Stringer said in demonstrating how to teach a dog to heel by using treats to keep it walking alongside. “And it works with everything, especially dogs.”

The lesson is a case of better late than never for the youth facility residents. If they had been where they needed to be and did what they needed to do, they wouldn’t have ended up at the detention facility. But if they learn those lessons now, they hopefully won’t have to come back.

The animal interaction program is one of several community partnerships the youth facility is developing, where visitors come in and give training or presentations to the kids. Volunteers from the Kenai Fire Department, Kenai Peninsula Job Center, The LeeShore Center and the Challenger Learning Center of Alaska have all participated.

“I think it’s really important that there’s a connection between kids and the community,” said Joe Mooney, school facilitator at the youth facility. “Oftentimes they don’t feel a connection with their school or social lives.”

Having positive con-nections in place when youths transition out of the juvenile justice system can create a safety net to keep them from winding up back in bad situations. That’s really what it comes down to, Mooney said.

“It’s a troubled situation, not troubled kids. All kids are great when you peel all the layers back,” he said.

The youth facility is a 10-bed detention center for juveniles in criminal trouble. Youths can be housed there temporarily, usually after being taken into custody while they wait to see a judge, or on a longer-term basis during prolonged court processes. Having such a facility in Kenai keeps peninsula juvenile offenders from being sent to Anchorage or having to be placed at Wildwood.

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District operates a school in the youth facility, with Mooney and a tutor teaching the multiage population. The goal is to keep students up on their education so they can transition back into mainstream schools.

The purpose of the community presenters, like Stringer with the Kenai Animal Shelter, is to offer lessons of a different kind — job skills, life skills, or a little of both.

This is Stringer’s second year volunteering at the youth facility. She comes in on Fridays, as schedules allow, bringing animals and an assistant from the shelter with her. She’s done presentations on ownership and basic care of all kinds of animals — from rodents to birds and more mainstream dogs and cats.

In August she began a six-week Canine Good Citizen training course. Youth facility students help Stringer train shelter dogs to follow commands like sit and heel, which improves their chances of being adopted. Meanwhile, the training improves the students’ chances of being better adapted to life beyond the youth facility.

“I see it as therapy for the kids, not training for the dogs. Patsy sees it as interaction for the dogs,” Mooney said.

Getting permission to bring dogs, much less ferrets or rats, to the youth facility was a trick in itself, since the state juvenile justice system has strict rules regarding such things. But Steve Kiefer, superintendent of the facility, said he sees it as a positive program.

“A lot of kids have bonds with animals at home. This gives them more tools to strengthen that relationship, and it gives them tools to lower anxiety levels and deal with stress,” he said.

The training prepares the dogs for being pets, and it prepares the students for being better pet owners.

“They’ll have a better idea what it takes, the responsibility to have a pet and know how to take care of it,” Mooney said.

On Aug. 22, at least one student clearly had experience with animals. He was able to take the rowdiest of the three dogs Stringer brought, Kip, and have him sitting, heeling and laying down.

“It just reminds me of being back. It’s fun petting them and playing with them. I haven’t been able to see my dogs for a while,” the student said.

Stringer said she likes to bring two hooligans and one of her own, already-trained dogs for the students to work with.

“So the children can at least work with one animal who is going to be responsive,” Stringer said. She wants them set up for success. “Not that the children can’t do it, they just don’t know how. Because they all have positives, every one of them.”

She could have been referring to the dogs or the students. Probably both, as Stringer often spoke to the kids and dogs with the same tone — firm yet positive, delivering specific, to-the-point instructions, and offering immediate praise for anything done right, all in her crisp English accent.

“Often the children are from difficult backgrounds. If you can get them to open themselves up by teaching them to interact with a dog in a positive manner, you get that communication with them,” Stringer said. “You teach them you can get anything with kindness and reward.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy — life or dog training.

“This is hard,” a student complained as their charge, an Australian shepherd named Trooper, seemed more interested in visiting with Stringer’s dog, Meg, than heeling.

“Of course it’s hard,” Stringer replied. “Everything in life is hard. But once you get it, it’s wonderful.”