Missing the Great Alaska Shootout? Here are some memories to get you through the week

The Great Alaska Shootout is gone, but not forgotten.

For the first time since 1978, there will be no Division I college basketball in Anchorage during Thanksgiving week.

To help fill the void, we asked several former UAA basketball players to share some of their favorite memories of the tournament, which ran for 40 years before it fell victim to budget cuts.

Today, Christian Leckband talks about a fiery halftime speech by Rusty Osborne at the 2012 Shootout and Ryan Williams remembers how relatives in the Lower 48 learned about the birth of his child when ESPN announced it during UAA’s televised game. Also sharing memories are Kamie Jo Massey, Megan Mullings, Kiki Robertson and Jesse Brown.

You can hear from more former Seawolves — including Jeff Sheedy, Butch Lincoln, Alysa Horn, Hanna Johansson, Ty Kuiper, Sarah Herrin and, yes, Jason Kaiser — here.

Christian Leckband

I always watched the Great Alaska Shootout growing up. Being a small-town kid from Nome, it was always amazing coming to Anchorage to watch all of the teams.

Never had I thought that one day I’d be playing in the Shootout myself. This was when the Great Alaska Shootout was still held at the Sullivan Arena so it made it even more special to me go out onto the same court that had such a plethora of history we can dig into.

It was 2012, my freshman year, and I’m all wide-eyed enjoying the atmosphere. I had always watched the games from the stands, which was amazing, but nothing quite compares to stepping out onto that court. Going from watching all these games growing up as a kid to now being able to compete on the same stage is something I’ll never forget.

We had lost the opener to Belmont, putting us in the consolation bracket but we were still hopeful for finishing strong. The next night we played UC Riverside and end up beating them by one point (66-65) to advance to the fourth-place game where we could tie the highest placement of any UAA men’s team in Shootout history. The next day we would be playing Loyola Marymount who looked physically dominant in their first couple of games.

I show up before the game for our pregame talk and practice and I notice our starting guard, Mike MacKelvie, was missing and am told that he has a serious sinus infection and that I would have to start that day. I had never gotten to start a game before, and I have to tell you I was incredibly nervous, especially playing in the Great Alaska Shootout and for the fourth-place spot.

It was a really physical and hard-fought game in the first half, physical to the point that a Loyola player actually had a tooth knocked out in the heat of action. In typical Rusty Osborne fashion, he’s all over the refs about the physicality of the game and the intensity of it all and then the first half comes to a close with us up by only a few points.

Exhausted as a team, we’re waiting in the locker room for Osborne to come in and tell us how badly we performed and to pick it up. To our surprise the door flings open and Osborne comes in incredibly fired up. He goes full Bob Knight and tosses some chairs to the side trying to get to the whiteboard (almost hitting a teammate) and he is just yelling all sorts of stuff that we could hardly understand and using an abundance of strong words. All I knew, and all my teammates knew, is it was time to go and we were all fired up after this. His final words, which came out as clear as day to all of us, were “YOU WILL WIN THIS GAME!” Sure enough, we come out in that second half and do exactly that in front of an amazing crowd packed into the Sullivan Arena.

I’ll never forget that game — the intensity and physicality of the game, the halftime speech to rally the team, then us rallying together as a squad and going out and getting that win.

Christian Leckband played for UAA from 2011-16. He lives in Anchorage and is a junior proposal manager at the Bering Straits Native Corp.

Ryan Williams

I have two vivid memories from the Shootout:

• The day before the 1995 Shootout, Indiana coach Bob Knight was so upset with his team at practice (they played UAA the next day) that he stormed off the court, walked out of Sullivan Arena through the maintenance exit and walked nearly a mile to the team hotel.

• Leading up to the 1996 Shootout, my wife had a due-date for our first child that was right in the middle of the Shootout. Thankfully she went into labor late the day before UAA’s opening game, eventually giving birth early in the morning the day of the game. This was in the pre-cellphone era, so most of our family and friends in the Lower 48 found out about our daughter’s birth that evening when Dan Shulman announced it early in the ESPN broadcast of the game.

Ryan Williams played for UAA from 1995-97. He and his wife have four children and live in Fresno, California, where he is a senior vice president for Olam International.

Megan Mullings

One of my favorite memories was being named the tourney MVP my first year with Anchorage. I felt that I was finally starting to fit into the UAA mayhem style and becoming a teammate and player my UAA family could depend on me to be.

But bigger than that was how many people always came to our games, it felt like all of Alaska was there to support us. I had never played anywhere with that much love in the stands. It made losing hard, but every win was so much sweeter. Especially seeing all the little ones who looked up to us so much.

Megan Mullings played for UAA from 2014-16. She plays professional basketball for the BBC Les Sangliers of Wiltz, Luxembourg.

Jesse Brown

I think finishing fourth in my senior year was a great memory. Also beating Montana in 2002-2003. I got my first start and had a pretty good defensive game. I held one of the better players in the Big Sky to a few points, and a couple week later Montana went to No. 1 Stanford and beat them on their court.

Just seeing and playing on the same court as the Dukes, Gonzagas and Seton Halls is special. You get to measure your game as a DII athlete against the best players and teams in the country. Playing in the same tournament as Dwayne Wade my senior year in 2003-2004 was fun. Most of all, it was fun playing with my brothers! Competing at a high level is always great and missed more than any one game.

I will miss the Shootout. Thanksgiving was always Shootout time!

Jesse Brown played for UAA from 2001-04. He works as the associate head coach of the UAF men’s basketball team in Fairbanks.

Kamie Jo Massey

Here are a few of my favorite memories from when we won the Shootout in 2002:

• We ran specific out-of-bounds plays to Amber Nasby and she made multiple jump shots off of them. She did this in the tournament and throughout our whole season. She was a phenomenal shooter!

• Whitney Leman, as a true freshman, made clutch free throws at the end of the championship game to bring us close enough to win it.

• Mindy Mendenhall Lindquist dove on a loose ball towards the end of the game and called a timeout. During the timeout, coach Jody Hensen set up a play to score. We executed the play and scored a last-second lay up to secure the 61-58 win over Clemson. The volume level of the cheering from the crowd was amazing!

• Holding up the trophy as a team after we won the tournament. It was incredible!

Kamie Jo Massey played for UAA from 2002-04. She lives in Utah with her husband and their three children and plans to return to nursing when her children are older.

Kiki Robertson

One of my favorite Shootout memories was beating Pepperdine by 33 in the first round of the 2015 tournament.

What made it so special was that my whole family came from Hawaii and Las Vegas.

Also, Pepperdine recruited me to play there, and it made me feel like I made the right decision choosing UAA despite it being a Division II school.

Kiki Robertson played for UAA from 2013-17. She lives in Hawaii.