Colony alum picked for UAA ‘Hall of Fame’

ANCHORAGE — From competing in elementary school to coaching at the collegiate level, Eric Strabel’s extensive athletic career has brought him into the Hall of Fame at his alma mater.

Strabel will be inducted into the University of Alaska’s hall of fame at 1 p.m., Oct. 12, along with former UAA student-athletes Peter Bullock and Tim Molle at the Alaska Airlines Center on campus. Once these three men have entered the Hall, there will be a total of 46 members who have been immortalized for their athletic performance. Of those 46, Strabel will be the fourth athlete recognized either for cross country running or Nordic skiing since the hall of fame began in 2001.

According to the school’s website, inductees are honored for exemplary athletic achievement and contributions made to the athletic department. They are chosen by a committee of coaches, boosters, volunteers and other staff and faculty members appointed by the athletic director. While former coaches and staff are eligible for induction five years after their university service, athletes are not eligible until 10 years have passed since their last competition for the University of Alaska.

“I was going to UAA just as they were starting (the Hall of Fame), so they had a lot of very, very distinguished and very well-deserving people (available) to be inducted,” Strabel said.

In a pool of such athletes, Strabel didn’t expect to be contacted as the recipient of such an honor.

“I never really considered myself at that level at all,” he said. “I had a good college career but I was very surprised to get a phone call.”

Strabel certainly fits the requirements on the results side of things, having performed well in track, cross country running and Nordic skiing at Colony High School and UAA. He led the university’s cross country team to the NCAA Championships for the first time in 2000 and helped win the program’s first-ever conference team title in 2002. He also earned three All-American honors in collegiate Nordic skiing and regularly placed in the top 10 in both skiing and cross country. To top it off, he received a silver medal for his performance at U.S. Nationals before retiring from Nordic ski racing in 2005.

However, results hardly paint the full picture of the man’s worthiness for the Seawolf Hall of Fame.

Trond Flagstad has a unique relationship with Strabel, having coached him as a UAA skier for two years, collaborated with him as an assistant ski coach for two years, and more recently competed against him in the mountain racing circuit.

“He’s very independent and very knowledgeable, and he sort of knew what he wanted so he was easy to coach,” Flagstad said, recalling Strabel’s nature as a college skier. “He was very eager, so my job was more to make sure I didn’t train him too much or too hard, and have discussions about what he would do.”

Strabel’s transition from athlete to coach was fairly seamless, Flagstad said, as they simply continued their relationship by having dialogues about training.

“He’s a great guy to work with. Very motivated and very hardworking,” Flagstad said.

Strabel continued to race in his first year as an assistant coach, which led him to U.S. Nationals, but by year two it was time for a break — his first ever.

Despite acknowledging that his former athlete was “burnt out” from competing, Flagstad thought Strabel’s retirement was a bit premature.

“I think that if he had kept going with skiing that he could have made it to the Olympics,” he said.

But Strabel remembers the uncomfortably high pressure of college competition, which could be one reason for his early “retirement.”

“It’s a huge economical system and it takes a lot of money to support those teams,” he said of the university’s athletic program. “It’s a big investment for the university to create a positive environment for the school, a positive representation.

“There was a rough season in there where I wanted to take a break, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t. With the support of coaches and teammates, though, it turned out pretty well.”

Promising though his athletic career may have been at the time, after graduation, Strabel had another task to think about. For a couple of years, he tried to put his civil engineering degree to work, but it didn’t turn out quite like he thought it would when he started school.

“It was a good experience to put my training to work professionally, but I just discovered that I had a hard time sitting in front of a computer for over eight hours a day managing projects,” he said. “I wanted to get out and work with people more in a physical sense.”

So he switched careers.

Now that Strabel has established himself at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage, he has an opportunity to support his own athletes as his coaches supported him.

Former APU skier and Colony High graduate Abe Meyerhofer had only good things to say about Strabel.

“He’s a great coach,” Meyerhofer said. “He knows his stuff and he’s pretty personable.”

After complementing his coach’s personality, Meyerhofer said that Strabel’s history of high achievement is particularly appealing to athletes who want to be instructed by someone with credibility.

“To have a coach who has performances and continues to perform at a super high level is just awesome,” he said.

Now, Strabel said that he prefers to be more concerned about his athletes than his own workout on the ski trails.

“It’s really awesome to see the other side of the sport, to see how much work it really takes to keep sports going, to keep teams growing and athletes growing,” he said. “It’s also really awesome for me because I get to learn that much more about the sport. It’s true that we don’t truly understand something until we learn how to teach it.”

Despite the serious time commitment coaching requires — as much as he may love it — Strabel is still going strong in his post-college career with mountain running, something that he said “always just seemed like a different sport all together” from cross country and skiing.

Strabel won the Alaska Mountain Runners Grand Prix in 2012 and 2013 and could win this year’s series, even without participating in the final race. In the last three years of mountain racing, he won all but four of the 15 races he ran, with two second-place finishes, one third-place, and one eighth-place. He was the first person and one of only two people — the other being Ben Marvin — to ever break the three-hour barrier in the Matanuska Peak Challenge, and he still holds the record for that course. He won the Crow Pass Crossing in 2006 and 2008 and took second place in the three years following.

Still, Strabel is cautious.

“In my older age, I have to be nicer to my body,” he said, laughing. “I hit the early racing season pretty hard, so I was taking a month-long break from structured training and I’m just getting back into it.”

Strabel is currently gearing up for the 2014 Equinox Marathon in Fairbanks scheduled for Sept. 20. In 2012, Strabel won the race in a record time of 2 hours, 45 minutes, 16 seconds. After one gap year, it looks as if he’ll soon be back to defend his title and continue the winning streak that has helped him into the Seawolf Hall of Fame.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.