Public Voting Ends Saturday
Help select the Class of 2020
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Every year the public plays an important role in deciding the people, moments and events to be inducted into the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame. Take a couple minutes to submit your choices! Voting closes midnight, AST, Nov 30th. |
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Please use a Laptop or Desktop Computer!
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- We use a drag and drop system that won't work on mobile devices and tablets.
- Voting open Nov 1st-30th
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The only female champion of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race (2000), Zirkle has also established herself as a perennial contender in the more famous Iditarod. She has finished runner-up three times (2012-14) while showing good sportsmanship and grace. Zirkle has also twice won the Iditarod’s coveted Humanitarian Award. The New Hampshire native moved to Alaska in 1990 and shares a kennel with fellow champion musher Allen Moore in Two Rivers.
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Audun Endestad
A nordic skier from Norway who has made his home in Fairbanks for decades, Endestad won a record 13 U.S. national championships and captured the Great American Ski Chase six times during a long career that continued into his 40s. He competed at the 1984 Sarajevo Games and finished 18th in the men’s 50K race. In 1990, he swept all four men’s races at the national championships in Anchorage.
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Bobby Hill
In a 31 year athletic career, the Eagle River Special Olympian — a 2-time world champion in powerlifting in the 2003 World Games in Ireland, and a 4-time silver medalist in powerlifting in the 2007 World Games in China — has won more than 200 gold, silver and bronze medals in powerlifting, floor hockey, golf and bocce. He was inducted into the Alaska Aces Hall of Fame for being their No. 1 fan in 2015, and in 2018 was honored by the Alaska Legislature for 20 years of dedication as the Bartlett High football team manager.
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Brad Precosky
The Anchorage mountain running great won Mount Marathon six times and owns 8 of the top 100 all-time best times. The co-founder of Alaska Mountain Runners club was a perennial threat in the 1990s and 2000s, racking up victories at Bird Ridge, Government Peak, Matanuska Peak and Turnagain Arm. He also brought the prestigious World Mountain Running Trophy to Girdwood in 2003.
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Carol (Pickett) Hull
The Native Games icon from Fairbanks won the 1989 Denali Award as Alaska’s Sportsperson of the Year. Even as a teenager she proved to be a natural with jaw-dropping kicks that reached 7 feet, pushing the women’s records to new heights. She still holds the world record in the traditional one-foot high kick, set in 1990.
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Chris Clark
In 2000, the 37-year-old mother and wife from Anchorage went from jogging on her treadmill to running the women’s marathon for the United States at the Sydney Olympics. She got there with a stunning victory in the Olympic Trials. Clark sliced more than seven minutes off her previous best to win the 26.2-mile trials race in 2 hours, 33 minutes, 31 seconds, two minutes ahead of anyone else. She earned the country’s only Olympic bid to Sydney, where she finished 19th in a field of 54 in a personal-best 2:31:35.
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Dan Jordan
Jordan, a Colorado native, was a standout rifle shooter before being paralyzed in a rock climbing accident. Thereafter he became a Paralympic silver medalist in 2004 and successful coach at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. As a UAF athlete, Jordan was a two-time NCAA All-American and as the UAF coach led the Nanooks to three NCAA championships. He retired from coaching in 2016 after 11 seasons with the Nanooks.
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Daryn Colledge
The veteran NFL offensive lineman from North Pole won a Super Bowl ring with the Green Bay Packers in his fifth and final season with the team in 2010. He also played for the Arizona Cardinals and Miami Dolphins. Known for his toughness, the 6-foot-4, 308-pound guard retired after the 2014 season. In 2016, he enlisted in the Idaho Army National Guard.
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Dennis Mattingly
He created the Anchorage Bucs baseball team in 1980 as an adult league team and a year later the team joined the Alaska Baseball League. Mattingly served as general manager for 30 years and helped develop 60 players who played Major League Baseball. In 1993, the Bucs were recognized as America’s No. 1 summer collegiate team. Mattingly died of cancer at age 63 in 2012.
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Dolly Lefever
In 1994, Lefever became the first American woman to climb the highest mountains on each continent, known as the Seven Summits. She also once shared the distinction of being the oldest woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which she accomplished on May 10, 1993, at age 47. Lefever also guided on Denali and twice won the 210-mile Iditaski race.
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Dorena Bingham
One of the most successful girls high school basketball coaches in Alaska history, Bingham won 280 games in 14 seasons at East Anchorage. She also won three Class 4A state championships and helped more than 100 girls play college basketball. Later she coached for the U.S. Junior National Team and NCAA Division I Seattle University. Now she works as a recreation supervisor at the Fairview Community Recreation Center in Anchorage.
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Doug Keil
After winning two gold medals in Norway with the U.S. Disabled Alpine Ski Team, Keil created Challenge Alaska, which serves thousands of people with disabilities each year. In 1982 he was the Handicapped Alaskan of the year and in 1983 he was a finalist for the President’s Trophy for the Distinguished Handicapped American Award. He was inducted into the Disabled Ski Hall of Fame in 2001.
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Doug Herron
He orchestrated one of the greatest moments in Alaska track and field history in 1985 when he ran 1:49.2 in the 800 meters, the fastest time in the nation by a high schooler that year. The Bartlett grad went to the University of Arizona and won a Pac-10 championship in the 800 in 1987. He later became a highly successful prep cross country and track coach and founded the Alaska Running Academy.
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Egil Ellis
The sprint musher, who moved to Willow from Sweden, claimed 61 international victories beginning in 1985. Among them were a record 12 Open North American Championships, 12 Tok Race of Champions titles, five Anchorage Fur Rendezvous Open World Championships and 7 Exxon Mobil Open wins. He also claimed the Triple Crown five times.
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Geoff Roes
In 2009 and 2010, the Juneau resident received his sport's highest honor: Ultrarunner of the Year. While a relative newcomer, Roes set course records at Alaska's Resurrection Pass 50 and Susitna 100. He followed up with new marks at the Wasatch 100 and prestigious Western States 100-mile Endurance Run in then-record time. Roes, who has retired from serious competition, still holds the Crow Pass Crossing course record and conducts popular ultrarunning camps in Juneau.
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George Nix
The Haida Indian from Hydaburg became Alaska's first professional football player in the 1920s. As a young man, Nix also excelled in boxing, track, wrestling and basketball. An extraordinarily gifted athlete, the lineman played for the legendary all-Indian Hominay Indians in Oklahoma before competing for the Buffalo Rangers of the National Football League.
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Jessica Moore
Known mostly for her time at the University of Connecticut, Moore won three NCAA Division I championships and was part of UConn’s 70-game winning streak from 2001-03. She played nine seasons in the WNBA, and at Colony High School, she won state titles in basketball, volleyball and track.
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Jim Balamaci
Balamaci was a passionate leader within the global Special Olympics movement for 40 years and served as President/CEO of Special Olympics Alaska since 1996 until he passed away in 2018. Under his leadership the Alaska program grew from 400 to 2000 athletes, was awarded and hosted the 2001 Special Olympics World Winter Games, the largest sports event to held in Alaska at the time and opened the Special Olympics Alaska Sports, Health and Wellness Center, a 20,000 sq foot state of the art sports facility in Anchorage.
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Jim Mahaffey
Mahaffey's devotion to Nordic skiing began in 1950 after arriving at Elmendorf Air Force Base. He later founded the Alaska Methodist University program, which included Olympians on the first female varsity college ski team in the nation, and developed trails around the state, including those at Alaska Pacific University that bear his name. Mahaffey also helped create the Equinox Marathon in Fairbanks and organized training runs for his ski team in the late 1960s that morphed into the still-popular Tuesday Night Race Series in Anchorage.
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Joe Floyd
The architect of the Kodiak High School athletic department beginning in 1955, he played an integral role in establishing every sport at the school, and he coached most of them. He was especially active in wrestling, basketball and baseball. Floyd was inducted into the Alaska Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Alaska High School Hall of Fame in 2007.
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John Faeo
One of the greatest drivers in Iron Dog history, he won a record seven titles in the 2,000-mile snowmachine race from Wasilla to Nome to Fairbanks. The Wasilla native captured his first Iron Dog in 1984 and his last in 1996. Between 1986 and 1991 he was virtually unbeatable, winning five of the six races in that stretch. In all, he raced 23 times.
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John ‘Iron Man’ Johnson
The Alaska musher from the early 1900s was a three-time winner of the All Alaska Sweepstakes, the world’s first organized distance sled dog race. The race was 408 miles from Nome to Candle and back, and in 1910 Johnson set a race record of 74 hours, 14 minutes, 37 seconds that stood until 2008.
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Judy Rabinowitz
The cross-country skier from Fairbanks joined the U.S. Ski Team in 1980, won three national titles and competed in the 1984 Olympics. Rabinowitz also won the prestigious American Birkebeiner Ski Race in 1979 and won a gold medal at the World Masters 4x5 relay in 2008.
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Kenny Sailors
A pioneer, and perhaps inventor, of the jump shot, Sailors after his playing days spent 30 years in Alaska as a basketball coach and hunting and fishing guide. Sailors led the University of Wyoming to its only national championship in 1943, was photographed airborne in Life Magazine and later played two seasons in the National Basketball Association. He died at age 95 in Laramie, Wyoming in 2016.
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Kristi (Klinnert) Waythomas
One of the greatest runners in Alaska history, she never lost a cross country race in high school and was named the 1986 Alaska Sportsperson of the Year. The Kodiak star went on to become a three-time NCAA Division I All-American at Northern Arizona, where she set conference and school records in the 10-K. She qualified for the Olympic Trials in the marathon and 10-K, and in 1995, she won a bronze medal in the marathon at the World University Games.
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Libby Riddles
The Iditarod Hall of Famer made history in 1985 when she became the first woman to win the 1,000-mile Last Great Race. She mushed into the teeth of a blizzard that kept every other racer in Shaktoolik, a daring move that made the difference. Riddles became an instant national phenomenon and was named the 1985 Women’s Sports Foundation’s Professional Sportswoman of the Year.
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Marcie Trent
The Anchorage runner is the most accomplished masters athlete in Alaska history. She was the first Alaskan woman over age 50 to qualify for the Boston Marathon, and once held nine national age-group records ranging from 800 meters to an ultramarathon. She won Fairbanks' Equinox Marathon three times and remains its oldest champion at age 58, and also claimed Colorado's Pikes Peak Marathon at age 57. Trent died in 1995 and was inducted into the USA Masters Hall of Fame in 2001.
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Marcus Dunbar
In his prime, no Alaska runner was faster. From the 800 to 5,000 meters, his times from the early 1990s were the standard and still rank among the state’s all-time best. He was the 1993 U.S. indoor mile champion after posting a PR of 4:00.58, a state record that stood for 20 years until his son broke it. A former standout at Bartlett High School, Dunbar went on to run in the Pac-10 for the University of Oregon. He also won a record 10 titles in the Heart Run 5-K in Anchorage and built a stalwart running program at Kodiak High School as head coach.
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Matias Saari
Saari won Fairbanks’ Equinox Marathon a record-tying six times — four of them in his forties — and wrote a book about that iconic event. He also won the Matanuska Peak Challenge four times and Mount Marathon Race once. Saari is now the race director for the Crow Pass Crossing, Mount Marathon, and the Tour of Anchorage Nordic ski race.
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Matt Carle
The Anchorage native won college hockey’s top individual award, the Hobey Baker, while a defenseman at the University of Denver in 2006; he also won two national championships with the Pioneers. Then Carle played 730 games in 10+ seasons for four NHL teams and twice reached the Stanley Cup Finals. He tallied 287 points in his NHL career and earned more than $40 million before retiring in 2016.
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Matt Emmons
He competed at four Olympics in rifle shooting and won three medals — gold at the 2004 Athens Games, silver at the 2008 Beijing Games and bronze at the 2012 London Games. Emmons was lauded for his good attitude after last-shot gaffes cost him two other Olympic medals. At the University of Alaska Fairbanks, he won eight NCAA riflery championships (four team, four individual).
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Mike Dunlap
Dunlap, who grew up in Fairbanks, became an NBA head coach with the Charlotte Bobcats in 2012-13 after serving as an assistant with the Denver Nuggets from 2006 to 2008. As a college head coach with Metro State, he won NCAA Division II titles in 2000 and 2002. As an assistant with Division I programs St. Johns, Arizona, Oregon, Southern Cal, Iowa and Loyola Marymount, he forged a reputation as one of college basketball’s top assistant coaches.
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Milo Griffin
One of the most recognizable faces in Alaska sports history as a player and coach, Milo Griffin of Fairbanks starred for the UAF men’s basketball team from 1966-69. He held the school’s scoring record for 36 years, became the first Nanooks player to have his number retired and also helped coach the team in the 1990s. Griffin taught and coached multiple sports at Lathrop High School (and other area schools) for more than 3o years.
oore in Two Rivers.
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Pam Dreyer
The first Alaskan to play Olympic hockey, she won a bronze medal with Team USA as a goaltender at the 2006 Games in Italy. Dreyer, of Eagle River, made 26 saves in sending Canada to a 3-1 loss at the 2004 World Championships, its first-ever defeat at the tournament. Dreyer made that all-tournament team as the U.S. won silver. At Brown University, she led the Bears to an NCAA runner-up finish in 2002 and a year later beat Canada twice at the 4 Nations Select Cup.
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Reggie Tongue
Tongue started 116 of 145 career games at defensive back with Kansas City, Seattle and New York Jets. He was a two-time All-Pac 10 selection at Oregon State University, where in 1996 he tied an NCAA Division I record by returning three interceptions for touchdowns in one game. He was the 1990 Alaska Player of the Year at Lathrop High School.
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Rick Abbott
A masters-division swimmer, Abbott still holds various state, national and world records. He also won two gold medals representing the United States at the Pan American Games in 1975. Abbott drove to Alaska and established a chiropractic practice in 1985.
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Robert “Big Bob” Aiken
At 6-foot-4 and 400 pounds, Big Bob from Barrow was larger than life in Native Games. During a 26-year career, the self-dubbed “World’s Largest Eskimo” dominated strength events at the World Eskimo Indian Olympics, winning many ulus in the Indian and Eskimo stick pulls and the four-man carry. After retiring from competition in 1989, he stayed active in Native Games as an ambassador, board member, coach and mentor. He died in 2015 at age 62.
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Rocky Klever
He became Alaska’s first NFL player when he joined the New York Jets in 1983 and averaged 11.2 yards per catch during a five-year career. He was a triple-threat (running, passing, catching) at the University of Montana, where he set a career rushing record of 2,238 yards that stood for 20 years. The former West High star was inducted into the University of Montana Hall of Fame in 2016 and the Alaska High School Hall of Fame in 2006.
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Roxy Wright
Roxy Wright is the only woman to win the Fur Rondy Open World Championship Sled Dog Race in Anchorage and was the first female to claim the Open North American Championship in Fairbanks. She won each prestigious race four times, including a sweep at age 66 after having retired from competitive racing more than two decades earlier. The daughter of legendary musher Gareth Wright, Roxy, an Athabascan, also won Europe's Alpirod in 1990.
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Sadie Maubet Bjornsen
Bjornsen is a two-time Olympian who finished the 2017-18 season as the sixth-ranked Nordic skier in the world. After moving from Washington to Alaska in 2011, she has earned 10 podiums on the World Cup and won a team sprint bronze medal at the 2017 World Championships in Finland. Bjornsen also volunteers for organizations such as Healthy Futures and has earned multiple degrees from Alaska Pacific University.
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Scott Davis
The Soldotna man owns a record seven championships in the 2,000-mile Iron Dog, the world’s longest snowmachine race. Davis captured titles in 1985, 1989, 1993, 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2007 with five different partners and has 16 career top-three finishes. In motocross, he has won more than a dozen state championships.
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Shannon Donley
Donley, of Anchorage, is a 10-time winner of the Eagle River Triathlon and an eight-time winner of the prestigious Gold Nugget Triathlon. She has also been successful beyond Alaska. At the 2011 Ironman World Championships in Hawaii, she placed fifth in the women’s 40-44 age group. She also won the women’s 35-39 age group at the 2006 U.S. national championships and placed fifth for age 35-39 at the 2006 world championships.
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Stan Brown
One of Alaska’s first college wrestling stars in the 1970s, he later was instrumental in starting the state’s Pop Warner Association for youth football and cheerleading in 1997. Brown wrestled at Arizona State and contended for a spot on the 1980 Olympic Team. He returned to Alaska and devoted much of his life to youth sports. In 2007, Brown died at age 50 of a heart attack; he is honored with the Stan Brown Memorial Field at Lions Park in Eagle River.
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Stan Justice
The king of the Equinox Marathon in Fairbanks, Justice has six titles and held the course record for 35 years. He owns five of the race's eight fastest times, including his 1984 effort of 2 hours, 41 minutes, 30 seconds that stood as the unthreatened course record until it was finally broken by Aaron Fletcher in 2019. During an eight-race stretch from 1980-87, Justice won six times and was runner-up twice.
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Steve Frank
One of the greatest basketball players in Fairbanks history, he won an Alaska high school state championship in 1972 with Lathrop High School and played at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has been recognized as one of the top 10 players in UAF history and stands among the school’s all-time rebounding leaders.
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Steve MacSwain
One of Alaska’s first hockey players to make it on the national scene, the Anchorage winger starred at the University of Minnesota, played for Team USA at the World Championships and played professionally in seven countries. During the 1981-82 season at East High School, he set the state’s single-season scoring record with 104 points. He was inducted into the Alaska High School Hall of Fame in 2012.
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Steve Moria
Despite playing just three seasons at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Moria remains the Nanooks' all-time hockey scoring leader. He tallied 271 points in 86 games, including a then-NCAA single-season record 109 points in 1984-85 which made him a finalist for the prestigious Hobey Baker Award. A British-Canadian national, Moria played professionally for 25 years in Britain before retiring in 2012.
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Ted Stevens
Stevens was a towering figure of Alaska politics and the principal sponsor and lifelong advocate of Title IX of the Equal Education Amendments, the 1972 law that mandated equality of opportunity for girls and women in education. His Senatorial career started in 1968 and he retired as the longest-serving Republican senator in United States history in 2009. He died the following year in a plane crash.
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Tyler Huntington
He holds the distinction of being the only person to win two of the toughest races in motor sports. In 2010 and 2011, Huntington and partner Chris Olds claimed the 2,000-mile Iron Dog Classic snowmachine event from Big Lake to Nome to Fairbanks. Then in his ninth attempt in 2012, he won the Yukon 800 Marathon riverboat race from Fairbanks to Galena and back. “It’s something I’ve been wanting my whole life and I finally got it,” Huntington, a Galena native who later moved to Fairbanks, said about his historic double.
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