Si Dennis leads the Alley Cats, one of Skagway’s six men’s league bowling teams this season. He’s been bowling in Skagway since he was a kid. One of his first bowling memories was from before there were machines to set the pins, he was hired for a penny a pin to set them manually.

“You had to get into the pit, clean up all the deadwood. Throw the rack down, bring it back up, and put it back down again so that the pins were set for the spare. Then you loaded the tray on top, for the next one. Then you jumped in there clean the deadwood off put the full rack down, and jump out of the pit,” said Dennis.

Dennis has won a lot of championships with the Alley Cats and last weekend, he got another. The Alley Cats swept the Brew Crew three in a row in a best of five series to take the trophy.

Game three of that series was close. Dennis said he thought the Cats had lost it, but in the tenth and deciding frame, the Alley Cat’s Andrew Cremata, bowling in the anchor position, made some magic happen.

“When he got up there you know if he threw the first ball in that dumb thing went in and hit the pins and we needed that. We needed that really bad. And then you got to the second one after okay. You know that could have clinched it, and it did,” said Dennis.

Cremata’s walk-away strike in the tenth frame clinched the win for the Alley Cats. Cremata called it a bit of gamesmanship to try and ruffle the Brew Crew’s anchor bowler. Who, following Cremata in the tenth, left a 5-7 split on what looked like a strike ball. The Alley Cats won the game by just four pins.

How many championships does this mean for Si Dennis?

“All the teams that I was on, I would guess maybe 25 – 30.”

In high school hoops, the Skagway Panthers hosted the Hoonah Braves last weekend in a two-game set. On the first night, both the boys and the girls came out victorious with fairly comfortable wins. The next day, after sleeping in the gym, the Lady Braves gave the Panthers everything they could handle, and then some.

“We were up four with about a minute and a half left. And then Hoonah got an easy bucket underneath that shouldn’t have happened. And so we come down and we get a great layup look underneath, but missed it. So we’re up two and they have the ball,” described Lady Panther’s coach Nate Jennings.

“Right about 20 seconds left, I think they hit the bucket to tie it. And then we had a couple of great looks at the buzzer of regulation to win that game. But we went into overtime, and it got even more intense. And the atmosphere was great,” said Jennings.

Skagway’s Lady Panthers would fall short by a bucket in overtime. Jennings said he witnessed the mental toughness of his team in the locker room afterward and is excited for the upcoming trip to Sitka at the end of May.

That trip is scheduled for just after the end of the school year, so Jennings has lots of plans for the teams while they’re in Sitka besides just basketball. Fishing, golfing, and maybe even catching a movie … in a real theater, are on the schedule.

Coming off two wins against Hoonah, Skagway boys coach Ross Barrett, said he expects to see some tough physical ball and challenging defenses in the round-robin style tournament in Sitka.

“A big thing I noticed last year is a lot of teams will play a two-three zone, we’ve seen matchup zones on us and we’ve also seen a little bit of man to man so we prepare for all those things.”

Barret says they feature a motion offense that can handle whatever the defense throws at them.

On to Haines for wrestling. High School coach Cosmo Fudge said he’s been working on skills with his team for about five weeks.

“We’re doing lots of scramble drills, lots of situational wrestling, and a lot of thinking about how to plan your attacks,” said Fudge.

The first meet of the season for Haines was also the regional tournament, returning state champion and Senior Wesley Verhamme wrestled as a heavyweight in that tourney and pinned every opponent he faced in the first period.

“He’s big, he’s strong, he’s fast, and he doesn’t come off the gas. So it’s good to have a guy like him in the room when that’s exactly the thing that these two freshmen need to be learning right now,” said Fudge.

Neither of the two freshmen on the three-man team advanced past regionals. Wesley Verhamme defends his state title on May 22 in Anchorage.