What 3 longtime Anchorage coaches see as the benefits of high school sports

Mar. 24—Rob Larkey grew up in Spenard playing hockey in the 1970s and graduated from West High.

Gary Snyder skied for East High in the 1980s.

Running track at Dimond in the 1990s is where you would find Scott Campbell.

Now teachers in the Anchorage Bowl’s three oldest high schools, they agree on one thing — coaching is fun, kids are great, and the pay is … well, kids are great.

But they keep grinding: praising effort, drawing up plays and preparing kids for the future.

Why?

Because with more than eight decades of coaching experience between them, they’ve seen how having sports in high schools — especially during challenging times — can assist and encourage kids to prioritize their own well-being.

Studies have shown that physical activity is existential gold. You can’t buy love, mental, emotional or physiological health, but you can earn it with sweat equity.

For Campbell, having sports broadly accessible in public schools is important on many levels.

Like reading, writing and arithmetic, he believes athletics need to be taught by appropriately experienced educators who are focused on what’s best for teenagers at different levels.

“The value in having it is that it’s accessible to just about anybody,” Campbell said of sports in high schools. “And as the club sports or the comp sports become more and more exclusive, and unfortunately, more and more expensive, it limits the number of participants.”

For incoming freshmen, making sports readily available to students and their parents is especially valuable, he said.

“Kids show up, they are immediately part of a group, you know, part of a team, and then they get to know their teammates,” Campbell said. “And then when they do start school three or four weeks later, all of a sudden they recognize people in the hallway, they know people in their classes. They’re already acclimated, that sort of thing, socially. I think that makes that transition all that much easier for them.”

For students, multiple options each season also present a variety of paths to participation. For some, team sports can feel like a better fit while individualistic activities might be more attractive to others.

Cost for some sports can be prohibitive, but the expenses of all sports are mitigated when offered by schools. Comp hockey expenses range north of $10,000 a season. The annual cost of training with the Alaska Pacific University ski program or Alaska Winter Stars is more than $2,000. The investment might not be practical for everyone.

At high schools in Anchorage, the door to educated and experienced coaches, athletic equipment and facilities is opened for $300. (That per-student activity fee was recently raised from $225.)

Behind that door is a potential springboard to success.

Scott Gomez and Kikkan Randall both cut their teeth competing for local high schools.

Larkey started his coaching career at East in the 1990s, where Gomez played three seasons as a Thunderbird. Gomez went on to win NHL rookie of the year, two Stanley Cups and skate for Team USA in the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Randall, who skied and ran cross country for Snyder at East, earned a gold medal skiing in the 2018 Winter Olympics and is now executive director of the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage.

Both stacked resumes, stoked competitive fire and worked to find comfort in tough situations through sports.

Part of West High’s Class of 1981, Larkey says Gomez, who grew up in Airport Heights playing on the rink that’s now named after him, was “most of all, just a happy kid.”

He credits Gomez’s parents for his levelheadedness but also points to sports and their contributions to happiness beyond physical fitness.

“Mental health,” Larkey mentions while recounting what sports provided his students after the pandemic. “I mean, that’s important to everybody, right? You know, you have the good days when you feel good about yourself and you’re happy and jolly, and then all of a sudden, you get hit with bills and problems and situations that drag you down. But you have to overcome that. And I think that’s what sports teaches you.”

What sports can also do is shape behavior. Studies show the highest rate of juvenile crime occurs immediately after school, and GPA requirements to play can deter absenteeism.

The tenacity that athletics foster can come from focusing on a single sport or several, but the coaches say letting students figure out their own path is important. Doing so teaches them accountability — it was your decision, kiddo. That was a decision Gomez had to make.

“Baseball was a big part of life growing up,” said Gomez’s father, Carlos. But he only played one year in high school. His dad explained simply: “Summer.”

Who can blame him? Those fish don’t catch themselves.

So he concentrated on hockey — his choice.

Snyder, 54, who graduated from East in 1990, is a proponent of kids — not necessarily parents or coaches — determining their athletic path.

“When a coach tells a teenager you need to only focus on this sport all year, I don’t think that’s best for the kid,” Snyder said. “I think it’s best for the coach’s private program.

“I think kids should be trying all sports and all kinds of things and figuring out what they’re good at for many, many years.”

For many kids, trying something different means not looking at a screen.

“With all the technology we’ve got now, kids are just generally less active,” Campbell said recently while sports were being considered in Anchorage School District budget cuts. “You lose that whole population of students that are coming out because they want to try it, or because their friends are doing it. And I think it’s important not to lose that group.”

The roles coaches have extend outside the school.

“You’re more than just a coach to a lot of these kids. You’re kind of a father figure to them, you know? Or a big brother. They look up to you,” Larkey said. “And you want to give them good advice in life, not just on the ice rink … you want them to have a good work ethic.”

Larkey, 62, who graduated from West in 1982, also cited learning to cope with disappointment. “Lose a big game, tomorrow will come. You’ve just got to get out of bed, strap up the boots and get ready to go the next day.”

All three coaches are aligned on the idea of sports as training wheels for life and associating fun with fitness to turn exercising into a lifelong pursuit.

“If you want your skier to keep going all the way through high school and do well as a senior, make sure it’s fun for them as a freshman, sophomore and junior,” Snyder summarized succinctly. “They don’t need to go to the Olympics when they’re 14. If you want your kid to go to the Olympics, they better still love it when they’re 21, 22, 23.”

The 45-year-old Dimond coach also agreed with Snyder on the role enjoying the activity plays. Coaches, and often parents, expect kids to put both focus and effort into their sports. But without fun, the likelihood of burnout skyrockets.

“As a coach to my athletes, I’m interested in them doing well and getting first place and breaking records and winning trophies, that’s all cool,” he said. “But really, it’s about teaching a healthy lifestyle, you know, how can you do this in the long term, and not just when somebody’s asking you to show up every day for three months. How can you do it later in life? In order for that to be appealing, I think it does have to be fun.”

Larkey was inducted into the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame in 2025. He won two high school hockey state championships and a national title in juniors, and then played for the UAA Seawolves.

His reverence for his coaches is apparent when talking about his high school coach, Roger Benson — “who gave me a chance to play as a freshman at West” — junior coach Jack Barzee and UAA bench bosses Don Lucia and Brush Christiansen.

“I got a chance to fish with those guys and tell them, ‘Thank you for giving me a chance,’ ” Larkey said. “You know, if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have the education I have. They didn’t have to give me a scholarship. They didn’t have to spend their time with me, and I just appreciate it.”

Larkey said they taught him about more than hockey, and he has tried to take that approach to his own coaching. His West High teams have participated in fundraisers for the American Heart Association, breast cancer awareness and other community causes.

“Giving back and supporting children through sports and community involvement has always been a core value in my life,” he said.

As teachers and coaches, Larkey, Snyder and Campbell have been pulling double shifts for decades to instill values like that in Anchorage’s most precious resource — the city’s next starting lineup.