Football's Newest, Northern Fans Make Playoffs
An Alaskan high school trades whaling for football and snags a surprise victory.
Oct. 13, 2008— -- It was not just that last weekend's football game in Barrow, Alaska, was played along the Arctic Ocean that made it so special. Or that the field was guarded by armed patrols with explosive charges to scare away the polar bears. It's not even that school buses were lined up as a crude wind break against the arctic gusts, or that they were shoveling the field during game play that made it a standout.
It was the Barrow Whalers, a team from a mostly native town of Barrow, Alaska, which never played football until three years ago, that took the spotlight.
In one of the northernmost communities on the planet, deep inside the Arctic Circle, life is hard in the small town of Barrow, where the school took up football as an experiment to fight a swelling dropout rate and drug and alcohol problem.
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