The game was simpler when Jeep Rice, Ray Bradley and Tom Ramage began coaching. Juneau football was run out of the beds of pickup trucks, Adair Kennedy Field was known as the Gravel Bowl and an offense\u2019s iterations could be broken down into two options: run right or run left.<\/p>\n
Since the trio began coaching in the early \u201880s, prep football in Juneau has grown from a backyard game to a 12-month program featuring highly-specialized athletes running multiple option offenses.<\/p>\n
With Ramage retiring this year after his last season heading Thunder Mountain High School\u2019s offensive unit, the trio\u2019s century of combined football knowledge has left the field for good.<\/p>\n
Rice, Bradley and Ramage had been there when football became a high school sport. Their legacies live on through the players, coaches and teachers they impacted during the past 30 years.<\/p>\n
On a Wednesday morning at Adair Kennedy, the three got together to talk about their careers and Juneau\u2019s development as a football town. The consensus: though excellence on the field was always a motivator, teaching life skills and developing young people kept them returning to the field, Friday after rainy Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s always been a fantastic environment with the community and the kids, and that\u2019s, you know, why we kept doing it for so many years. We didn\u2019t do it to make money,\u201d Ramage said. \u201cNone of us got rich coaching football.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was for the love of the game, the players,\u201d Bradley said.<\/p>\n
\nBefore Juneau-Douglas High School had a football program, Rice, Bradley and Ramage coached Juneau\u2019s original club team, a high-school-age incarnation of the Juneau Youth Football League.<\/p>\n
The team practiced at Adair Kennedy Field, then just a dirt patch filled with dense glacial silt and freckled with rocks, shale and the occasional glass shard.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d line up the kids at the back of the end zone and have them walk down the field an arm apart picking up rocks, glass, shale,\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n
The unforgiving venue toughened Juneau\u2019s early players and allowed a certain home field advantage.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou had to love football to come out here and make a flying tackle or a diving catch in sideways rain and get scraped up,\u201d Rice said. \u201cPlayers here in Juneau are a little bit special in that regard.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1989, coaches and parents from the club program \u2014 then almost 10 years old \u2014 approached the Juneau School Board with a proposal to include football with JDHS athletics. They wanted to require a little bit more from their athletes off the field.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat changed the rules so kids had to have good grades and couldn\u2019t drink and that crap,\u201d Ramage said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we were going for. We wanted it to be a legitimate high school sport.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team was sanctioned but independent; they technically couldn\u2019t compete for a state championship. Dave Haney was the original head coach of the Crimson Bears in \u201889 and \u201890 and Rice the defensive coordinator.<\/p>\n
Bradley started his coaching career in Fairbanks with his son\u2019s youth teams 1978. He moved to Juneau in \u201882 and took an open division team in JYFL in \u201883.<\/p>\n
Bradley and Rice coached against each other in those early years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t like it,\u201d Rice said of coaching opposite Bradley, who\u2019s opinion differed. \u201cWell, I thought it was fine, I won.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t remember it that way,\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n
When JDHS became a sanctioned team, Rice and Bradley joined forces, with Rice coaching \u201cwherever there was need, offensive coordinator, special teams,\u201d and Bradley helping out on defense, taking the coordinator position for some of the early years.<\/p>\n
Bradley remembers Rice \u2014 10 years his senior \u2014 helping him mature as a coach.<\/p>\n
\u201cJeep really helped me. When you\u2019re young coaching you have a lot of ego and you think you have to win at all costs, but you have a journey and you learn. What I learned was that it was better to teach life skills and get young men \u2014 and women, we coached women, too \u2014 ready for life,\u201d Bradley said.<\/p>\n
Ramage moved to Juneau in \u201884. He was the first offensive coordinator under coach Haney during JDHS\u2019 inaugural 1990 season.<\/p>\n
Bradley, Rice and Ramage coached together at JDHS from 1990 until 2005, when beloved JDHS head coach Reilly Richey passed away from liver cancer.<\/p>\n
By then Ramage, who sounds Rice\u2019s \u201cfootball nerd alert,\u201d had developed a unique offensive philosophy. With Richey\u2019s passing, he thought it was time to test his coaching ability in the Lower 48.<\/p>\n
He found a job in the Bay Area with football powerhouse De La Salle, a private catholic school then enjoying several undefeated seasons.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to go down south and challenge myself to see if I was as good as I thought I was, honestly,\u201d Ramage said. \u201cIt was a great, great quest for my career, I really enjoyed it. I got to coaching some fantastic, nationally ranked programs.\u201d <\/p>\n
But Ramage always knew he\u2019d come back to Alaska. After leaving De La Salle, the heating and ventilation worker got a job offer in Fairbanks, and worked with the football program at North Pole High School.<\/p>\n
By then, Thunder Mountain High School was preparing for its second football season, and they needed a coach.<\/p>\n
Ramage got a call from Rice.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe (Rice) said, \u2018Hey I am probably going to take over this program in Juneau, do you want to come play?\u2019 so to speak,\u201d Ramage remembers. \u201cComing back was great. It was kind of like getting the band back together. We had coached together all those years and then we hadn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rice was the second head coach at Thunder Mountain.<\/p>\n
Rice, Bradley and Ramage were always private sector guys, and couldn\u2019t keep in touch with the players the way a teacher could. When current Falcons head coach Randy Quinto got hired at Thunder Mountain, the trio were happy to pass the torch to the younger coach.<\/p>\n
\nRiding off into the sunset and the elephant in the room<\/strong><\/p>\n Bradley and Rice ended their careers at Thunder Mountain last year. Ramage stayed on for another year but suffered a stroke, and decided to call it quits after helping the Falcons to a banner 2016 season.<\/p>\n Football is a much different game now, both on the field and off.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I first came here in the \u201880s, there was still a single wing, I thought one guy running kind of almost a legitimate Notre Dame box from the 40s,\u201d Ramage said. \u201cThis year we ran a five-way RPO (Run\/Pass Offense). The technical aspect of the game, the skill aspect that\u2019s demanded from the athletes is huge now. It was very much a backyard game when we first started doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we coached,\u201d Bradley said. \u201cIt was \u2018OK, football starts in three, four weeks, let\u2019s go get ready.\u2019 Now, it\u2019s a 12-month program.\u201d<\/p>\n Athletes are \u201cbigger, faster and stronger\u201d now, but the coaches say work ethic has slipped, though they don\u2019t blame players.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of my favorite coaches, John Wooden, said kids don\u2019t change, culture does,\u201d Ramage said.<\/p>\n The trio has coached several JDHS and TMHS coaches over the years, including Rick Sjoroos, Eddie Brakes, Quinto and Jeff Hedges.<\/p>\n They\u2019re particularly proud of leaving that legacy.<\/p>\n \u201cI was kind of bummed out about retiring, you know, honestly, I am going to miss it. But, that kind of helps the pain a little bit to know that those guys we taught are going to carry on a little bit of us,\u201d Ramage said.<\/p>\n They\u2019re also proud of the impact they\u2019ve had on the community.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a lot of years of coaching, we figured out we probably helped over a thousand. We had teachers, policemen,\u201d Bradley said, who also joked that it\u2019s fun to have had kids ask him how good their dads were.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of us have coached second-, third-generation kids in town. It\u2019s kind of cool to be around to see that,\u201d Ramage said. \u201cYou have to understand what a payoff as a coach that is, to see these guys get married, get a job. Got a kid, great kid, raised them well.\u201d<\/p>\n Though they\u2019ve left Juneau football better than they started it, all three see some tough choices on the horizon for prep football in Juneau. Ramage, for one, thinks coach Quinto has the momentum, work ethic and coaching staff to keep the momentum going at Thunder Mountain, but all that may not be enough.<\/p>\n \u201cThe elephant in the room is money. Are we going to meld together, JD and TM and with the numbers the way they are?\u201d he said. \u201cCan the community continue support two teams? What happens when they combine the teams, at that point you have two different head coaches at two different schools. I know you will have kids that will play and will not play. I don\u2019t have those answers. \u2026 His (Quinto\u2019s) biggest obstacle is not him or his coaching staff or even Soldotna, it\u2019s money.\u201d<\/p>\n Both JDHS and Thunder Mountain have dropped their JV programs, which has hurt both team\u2019s development.<\/p>\n \u201cFinancially, on paper, (a merger) kind of makes sense.\u201d Ramage said. \u201cIf that\u2019s your goal,\u201d Rice interjected. \u201cAnd that\u2019s the golden ticket right there. If finance is your goal. Jeep is right. We help a lot of kids, keep them off the streets, out of jail, coach the ethics that Ray is talking about, and that\u2019s how we reach them as coaches, more so than Xs and Os, and that\u2019s our goal. We want them to be good citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Contact Sports and Outdoors reporter Kevin Gullufsen at 523-2228 or kevin.gullufsen@juneauempire.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The game was simpler when Jeep Rice, Ray Bradley and Tom Ramage began coaching. Juneau football was run out of the beds of pickup trucks, Adair Kennedy Field was known as the Gravel Bowl and an offense\u2019s iterations could be broken down into two options: run right or run left. 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