School Spotlight: Seward High, Alaska

Today’s school spotlight is off the beaten path. I called coach Tyler Mallory from Seward High School in Alaska because, like other states, Alaska has some real talent. They are highly overlooked because of the distance up there, but there are some real diamonds in the rough there. I spoke to coach Mallory for a solid 30 minutes and learned so much about Alaska football. -Coach Andy

Seward High School is located in Seward, Alaska. Seward is a small town with a population of around 2,773 people. Seward is a port city in southern Alaska, set on an inlet on the Kenai Peninsula. It’s a gateway to Kenai Fjords National Park, where glaciers flow from the Harding Icefield into coastal fjords.

Coach Tyler Mallory leads the Seward Seahawks as their head coach. He played at Diamond High School in Alaska. “I had to work my way through the ranks there,” said coach Mallory, “Diamond is a really big school up here with nearly 2000 students. There are three divisions of schools in Alaska; Big Schools, Medium Schools, and Small Schools. Seward plays in the Small School division. We have about 150 high school kids in the school and we have some home school kids that play for us as well. We have about 35 kids on the football team which is the most this school has ever had on the team. We play schools around the same size as us. Schools with 450 kids is supposed to be the cut off for the Small School division. So our closest bus ride is about three and a half hours with two of our division opponents are in Fairbanks which is about a 10-12 hour bus ride. This is a much different experience to what I grew u in or schools in the lower 48 have.”

Coach Mallory has been at Sward for six years now and head coach for two and said, “we have never taken nothing but a school bus since I have been here. We have been fundraising pretty hard so we can take a charter bus on some of these long bus rides we do. We have had some growing pains here. I am the third head coach here now in the past six years. The most we have ever had on the team since I have been here is 18 kids.

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