Thunder on the Tundra: Football Above the Arctic Circle

by Lew Freedman

Overview

This is the moving story of high school students in an isolated village at the top of Alaska starting a football team. Against long odds the Whalers had to practice and play in extreme conditions and travel hundreds of miles from home when they went on the "road," flying for each game.They ended their first season victorious, while maintaining their subsistence hunter-gather culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780882408446
Publisher:	Turner Publishing Company
Publication date:	04/01/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	804,704
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

Lew Freedman is a Chicago-based sportswriter who lived in Alaska for seventeen years. A prizewinning journalist, the former sports editor of the Anchorage Daily Newsis a graduate of Boston University, and earned a master's degree from Alaska Pacific University. He is the author of thirty books about Alaska and sports. He lives in Bolingbrook, Illinois with his wife Debra.

Read an Excerpt

"The moment I heard that Barrow High School was going to start a football team I knew something special was in the works. 'Who were they going to play', I thought. 'Where is the closest opponent?," I wondered."

Table of Contents

Ch 1:August Two-a-days, Ch 2:This is Barrow, Ch 3:Beginnings, Ch 4:Practive Makes Perfect, Ch 5:Are You Ready for Some Football?, Ch 6:Football on the Last Frontier, Ch 7:Field of Dreams, Ch 8:Do You Believe in Miracles?, Ch 9:Bad Old Days, Ch 10:It's a Girl, Ch11:Wild Life, Ch:12 Monroe Catholic, Ch 13: The Whalers, Ch 14:Seasons, Ch 15:Getting Ready, Ch 16:The Ravens Are Ravenous, Ch17:Road Trip, Ch 18:Everyone Knows the Whalers, Ch 19:Houston Hospitality, Ch 20:Home on the Tundra Again, Ch 21:Making it All Work, Ch 22:Delta Force, Ch 23:The Pipeline Bowl, Ch 24:Pivotal Moment, Ch 25:The Longest and Last Road Trip, Ch 26 End Game.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 7 Up

The isolated tundra town of Barrow, AK-traditional home to an Inupiat Eskimo whaling community-might not seem like the ideal place to start a football program. But, faced with escalating teen dropout rates and boredom-borne substance-abuse problems, the superintendent of North Slope Borough Schools stubbornly worked to create the Barrow High School Whalers. The team first suited up and began practicing on their barren, rock-riddled gridiron in 2006-once, that is, they had actually figured out how to put on their pads. With a team presumably more prepared to hurl harpoons than 30-yard touchdown passes, and the nearest "crosstown" rival hundreds of seemingly impassible miles away, the Whalers drew the attention of ESPN, which aired a human-interest piece on their improbable initial season. The segment drew the attention of one Floridian football mom who, convinced of the sport's redemptive powers in channeling youthful energies, raised enough money for an artificial turf field and attendance at a football camp in Florida. Her pigskin philanthropy seemed to galvanize once-wavering community support, and what follows is a game-by-game account of their emergent second season-one in which the team learns to win and to lose as a cohesive unit, and does so with nearly perfect dignity. Though the book probes a bit less into the individual teen lives potentially salvaged by adopting a completely alien Lower 48 sport than one might have hoped, it does, nevertheless, provide rare insight into adolescent, academic, and family life on America's quickly changing final frontier.-Jeffrey Hastings, Highlander Way Middle School, Howell, MI

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