As Kayhi rolls into this year’s girls soccer season, the Lady Kings are faced with a new challenge aside from scoring goals. They have to find opponents to play.
Back in 2024, the Juneau School District was facing a nearly 10 million dollar budget deficit. To address this deficit, the district voted to consolidate schools, leaving Kayhi as the only team in its conference. This left the team without required opponents and searching across the state for teams to play.
“I mean, it killed our soccer conference,” said Kayhi’s athletic director Kelly Smith.
Smith has worked to turn that isolation into an advantage. Instead of spending up to $15,000 for every away game, the team pays a fraction of that — around $4,000 — to fly opponents into Ketchikan. That loads the schedule with home games and keeps players in their own beds and in front of their own fans.
“Parents want to watch their kids,” Smith said. “And the kids like to travel, but they travel a lot, and it keeps them in school. It keeps them in their own beds, and like I said, it is way cheaper to travel here.”
The consolidation impacted all Kayhi sports. But for soccer, the damage from the merge was especially bad. Before Juneau consolidated schools, those matchups were free, because they were required.
Now, every game on the schedule requires money, logistics, and sometimes even horse-trading between programs.
“There’s a lot of reciprocation,” Smith said. “So, ‘hey, you come to us in this, we’ll go to you in that,’” Smith said.
For example, he said, Soldotna came to Ketchikan for soccer last year. In return, Kayhi’s girls basketball team went to Soldotna’s tournament this year.
The handshake deals keep the schedule alive, but the coach knows they’re not sustainable.
“It’s hard,” Smith sad. It’s getting harder and harder. Our budget’s getting smaller and smaller, as everybody knows, and travel is getting more and more expensive. So, it’s very challenging.”
Smith has been pushing to get the team back into a conference so that they will have guaranteed opponents in the future.
“It’s so great that those schools agreed to come down for soccer this year,” he said. “But it’d be a lot more reassuring when they’re required to come down.”
Hosting comes with its own demands. Ketchikan High School — affectionately called “Hotel Kayhi”— houses visiting teams on a near-weekly basis across all sports, keeping a couple of classrooms ready at all times.
“We’re fortunate to have a couple rooms that they don’t have to move out of and stay ready all the time,” People don’t know this, but we house here about every weekend. Like last night, the Metlakatla and Craig Pep Band stayed in the school once they got off the ferry,” Smith said.
Junior Winter Loretan has been playing soccer since she was a kid. She says she’s grateful they have games to play at all.
“Literally nobody has to play us,” Loretan said. “We could not have a single game until State, which is the unfortunate thing.”
She knows there’s not always an incentive for teams to travel from across the state to play in Ketchikan.
“Especially because of our history, not in a negative way, but our history, we don’t have the best win-loss ratio ever,” Loretain said. “Like, we’re not the greatest team to play. We are not the most exciting team to travel in the Milk Run for multiple hours to come play.”
Despite this, she thinks the team’s outcomes this year will be strong. She’s been playing with the same group of girls for years, and she recognizes the potential.
“These girls have been playing since freshman year,” ,” Loretan said. “I think alongside the mess we’ve had for the past 3 years, I think this is where our seniors feel like this is their year.”
On top of that, being the lone team in the conference does come with one silver lining: a guaranteed bid to the State tournament.
Finding opponents isn’t the only challenge the team is facing–they’re low on players. In past seasons, as many as 40 girls tried out. This spring, Head Coach Neil Kinunen is hoping for around 15.
“It might be the smallest squad of players we’ve had,” said Kinunen.
The conference change also eradicated all of the JV game opportunities for the soccer team. But since the team is so small this year, Kinunen says it actually works out in Kayhi’s favor.
“We don’t have Thunder Mountain and Juneau Douglas to play anymore, which provided all our JV games,” said Kinunen. “So now you don’t really have an opportunity for the JV team to get any games. So a smaller squad is kind of a little more practical.”
Kinunen said he’s most concerned about the health of his athletes – and without the numbers, they can’t risk losing anyone on the field. Though the team is small, the core group is strong. Nine seniors anchor the roster– most of whom have played together since middle school.
“As far as classes, a collection of players in one class over the years, this could be definitely near the top,” said Kinunen.
The Lady Kings are in for a long season, with the State Championship lining up with their graduation on May 24th.
This story is part of a collaboration between Kayhi’s journalism program and KRBD.
