Magic Sauce at the Native Youth Olympic Games

I have been an athlete all my life participating in in many sports including triathlon, racquetball, and swimming. I come from an athletic family as well; my brothers play ice hockey, run track and field, and participate in long distance cycling, and my father was a football player and martial artist. I have also dedicated nearly two decades of my life to leadership in youth sports through competitive swimming; I have been the head coach of several programs, I have been the assistant coach to many talented head coaches, and I have taught swimming as a stepping stone as well as a lifesaving skill to hundreds of people.

Nothing I have seen thus far prepared me for the athleticism I witnessed from the young people competing in the statewide NYO games.

This year, for the first time, I got to step into an official’s role through Cook Inlet Tribal Council at Alaska’s Native Youth Olympic Games. I officiated at the Anchorage tryouts as well as at the statewide games. I have been fortunate to be a spectator at sporting events during which some of the world’s most recognizable and skilled athletes have competed including NHL hockey players, world-class alpine and cross-country skiers, soccer players with internationally successful careers, and many Olympic swimmers, but nothing I have seen thus far prepared me for the athleticism I witnessed from the young people competing in the statewide NYO games. Strength, balance, power, endurance, focus, and grit — these young people have it all! But there was something else I saw at the games that struck me, and it is what I find myself thinking about even more than the skill the athletes displayed.

Each time an athlete missed a mark, an experienced official would meet them on floor to tell them how far they were off and to give them tips about how to meet it in the next attempt. Athletes traveled to town with their own coaches, of course, but once competition was under way every coach invested themselves in the success of every athlete; if they saw a young person who could use their knowledge to do better, they shared it without hesitation. When an athlete was down to the wire with one attempt…