Native Youth Olympians bring culture, sportsmanship to competition

HOUSTON — As organizers and competitors pulled out the apparatus for the next event, Phillip Pease sat in the bleachers at the Native Youth Olympics Saturday sporting a bronze medal and greasy hands.

The grease came from the Indian Stick Pull event he’d just wrapped up, in which competitors try to pull a tapered dowel covered in Crisco from each others’ hands.

“It takes a lot,” Pease said of the strength needed to compete. “You have to just grip as tight as you can and hope you end up with it at the end.”

And the grease sticks around awhile, he said.

“It won’t come off until tonight,” he said, looking at his hand.

In another part of the gym, Peter Frank helped run the events and watched his Burchell High School team compete. He said Burchell had a team maybe three years ago, but hadn’t competed since. The 11 kids he brought with him were mostly rookies then. One of the few with experience, he said, actually stepped up to be something of a pseudo-coach. Despite facing some tough competition — including the defending state champs from Wasilla — he said his team was fairing well.

“They’re having so much fun, we think we’re going to expand it and have more Burchell kids next year,” Frank said. “They were totally apprehensive, extremely nervous, but they’re all competitors.”

Some even came away with medals, he said, which put big, broad smiles on their faces.

Keeping track of the brackets for the girls’ Indian Stick Pull was the Houston team’s coach, Jared Barrett. He’s actually a gym teacher at Burchell, but coaches football, wrestling and NYO at Houston.

“This is the first time we’ve done the Indian Stick Pull this way,” Barrett said.

Designed to simulate pulling a wet salmon from, say, a fish wheel, usually competitors are disqualified for any movement beyond a straight pull on the stick. But this year they were twisting their wrists and leaning their bodies.

“This way it’s rip the stick out any way you can,” Barrett said.

The Indian Stick Pull, he said, is won or lost based on grip strength. It’s a great equalizer, which is why it didn’t matter much that high school juniors like Pease were at times competing against seventh-graders.

“I had a little girl on my team pulling it right out of my hand,” Barrett said.

Despite all the teams needing to learn on the fly a new way to compete in that event, he said Saturday’s competition started only a half hour late. Friday’s competitions were behind for only 10 minutes at the most. That’s great, Barrett said, considering these events are sometimes hours behind schedule.

“This is one of the smoothest tournaments I’ve seen,” Barrett said.

Under a basketball hoop, watching volunteers trot out the apparatus for the 1-foot-high-kick, Su-Valley Jr./Sr. High School’s coach, Tom Harrison, said his team had managed to score about a half-dozen medals.

Saturday’s competition was a means to win a spot on the district team and thus earn a spot competing at the statewide competition. Harrison said funding cuts have the district doing it that way; schools usually send their own teams. Su-Valley is kind of the exception; the school managed to get some alternative funding and will send its own team again this year.

Harrison said there are a lot of goals to the NYO program.

“There’s definitely the exposure to Native culture,” he said. “Perhaps even more important than that is it allows certain kids to compete that might not necessarily find a spot in one of the bigger, more competitive sports.”

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t great athleticism on display, Harrison said. But some athletes thrive in a less regimented sport like NYO that makes fewer demands on players’ time.

Each match Saturday ended with a handshake, or a hug, and few — if any —seemed anything but genuine.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.