I found college hockey history in a bargain bin at Value Village
What’s a used hockey stick worth?
The Louisville Slugger goalie paddle stuck out like a black eye at a wedding when I spotted it at the Value Village in East Anchorage last month, its wide, taped wooden paddle standing in stark contrast to the bent ski poles and discarded 9-irons that shared the bin of used sporting goods. Hockey sticks aren’t cheap, so I grabbed it and checked the price tag.
Whoa, I thought. It’s only $7.99. Even used goalie sticks cost anywhere between $30 and $200 bucks — and new ones can run twice that.
Double whoa, I thought again. It’s signed.
As I looked closer at my new treasure I saw the stick was stamped with the name “HORN” and signed “UAA Tourny ’88, Bill Horn #1 WMU.” That wasn’t all. In addition to Horn’s signature, I could make out about a dozen semi-legible scrawls in green ink — including a few names I recognized as UAA players from back in the day.
I bought the 30-year old hockey stick, and then things really got interesting. After going home to fire up the Google machine, I quickly learned “UAA Tourny ‘88” was a reference to one of the most important victories in University of Alaska-Anchorage Seawolves hockey history:
The Wraparound.
Back in 1988, the Seawolves were an up-and-coming independent program with a rabid fan base and a growing reputation. The team’s annual Jeep/Nissan Classic tournament regularly attracted some of the best programs in Division I college hockey, but until that season had never won its own tournament.
That changed in the second overtime of the championship game, when UAA’s Steve Bogoyevac beat Horn with the wraparound heard ‘round the Anchorage Bowl, setting off jubilation among the 5,503 faithful inside Sullivan Arena and elevating the Seawolves to the brink of national prominence.
“The Seawolves have arrived,” pronounced Doyle Woody, then a young sports reporter for the Anchorage Daily News.
UAA senior captain Mike Peluso told Woody the victory was the culmination of years of hard work.
“I’ve waited pretty long for this,” Peluso said. “There’s been some negative moments in my years here. This moment erases all those.”
And what a moment it was. Current ADN sports editor Beth Bragg remembers being one of four or five staff members covering the game that night. The victory was such an event it warranted a Lew Freedman column in the sports section and an editorial in the following day’s paper.
“It is not hyperbole to say these are the biggest wins in school history,” wrote Freedman, a prolific author and an authority on both hockey and hyperbole.
UAA narrowly missed out on the college hockey playoffs that season, but the victory was the first of many big wins during the program’s most impressive run under legendary head coach Brush Christiansen. Christiansen’s squad advanced to the NCAA Division I tournament in each of the next three seasons, winning its only tournament series in school history over Boston College in 1991.
The victory over Western Michigan included some of the greatest names in UAA history. Peluso went on to an eight-year career as an enforcer in the NHL, while Rob Conn suited up 30 times during stints in Chicago and Buffalo. That night’s winning goaltender — and tournament MVP — Paul Krake holds the record for most wins in program history. Krake is in the school’s athletic Hall of Fame, as are Peluso, Conn, Dean Larson (UAA’s all-time leading scorer), Doug Spooner and Derek Donald. Of the 10 hockey players enshrined in the UAA Hall of Fame, six played in the 1988 championship.
Horn did pretty well for himself, too. The Saskatchewan native went on to become Western Michigan’s all-time wins leader and was enshrined in the school’s Hall of Fame in 2019.
By matching rosters with faded signatures I was able to make out the names of Horn, Carlson, Spooner, Conn, Krake, Tim Kollman and Dean Trboyevich, along with what I suspect are the names of Mike Cusack, Rod Trenholm, Gary Dixon Jr. and Sean Noble. There’s also a couple possibles: two vague D’s could belong to Donald and/or Larson, while a “C” is probably part of Peluso’s.
A lot’s changed since 1988. After their meteoric rise under Christiansen, the Seawolves’ shine faded over the years. A rejection by one of college hockey’s biggest conferences a decade ago hastened the team’s demise, and state budget woes have helped to nearly finish them off. In August, the now semi-retired Woody returned from exile to pen an epitaph for the Green and Gold.
“UAA hockey is dead and, weirdly, the obituary preceded the death, which made it chef’s-kiss on-brand in this surreal 2020…” wrote Woody, who is now a part-time hockey blogger in Tennessee.
Woody wrote those words after UAA announced the team would be folding following the 2021 season. It seemed then that all that would soon be left of the team would be the silver-lined memories of its aging fans and the beer-splashed recollections of its former players.
It was another devastating blow to Anchorage’s hangdog and heartbroken hockey heads, who in recent years has suffered the double indignities of seeing their Division I team cast out from one of college hockey’s top conferences and watching their lone pro sports team, the ECHL’s Alaska Aces, move to Maine; once a monolithic and menacing steel trap of a barn that hosted everyone from the Gophers to the Russians, the brutalist Sullivan Arena is now shelter for the city’s homeless. It seemed the dream of the 1980s had been cast into the bargain bin of memory.
Turns out dreams don’t die that easy.
Last year a handful of Seawolves faithful decided to pull a Peluso — they picked a fight. Known as “Save Seawolf Hockey,” the group orchestrated a grassroots campaign to raise the $1.5 million needed to keep the program running for the next two seasons. The band of die-hards has held auctions, raffles, an alumni hockey game and solicited corporate donations to help save the squad.
And it appears the effort might just work. Last month the Seawolves received a helping tentacle from new NHL franchise the Seattle Kracken, which put up $100,000 over the next two seasons and challenged other businesses to do the same.
A little-known college hockey team whose glory days consist of fleeting brushes with respectability might not seem like something much worth saving. But then, neither does an old goalie stick — unless you take a closer look.
Sometimes there’s a little magic left.
Matt Tunseth is a freelance writer and photographer from Anchorage, Alaska. Write to him at matthew.tunseth@gmail.com.
