The Thunder Mountain High School boys basketball team embarked on its second four-game roadtrip in as many weeks on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
After a 2-2 showing at the Franklin High School Tournament of Champions in Seattle last week, the Falcons are off to Fairbanks and the 2019 Mt. McKinley Bank Holiday Classic.<\/p>\n
It will be coach John Blasco’s third time bringing a team to the tournament, which kicks off with two boys and two girls contests at Monroe Catholic High School today, including Thunder Mountain versus Monroe Catholic at 8 p.m.<\/p>\n
TMHS squared off against West Valley in non-tournament action Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
“Monroe and Coach (Frank) Ostanik put on a great tournament,” Blasco said by cellphone. “They’re bringing very good competition and it’s a real fun environment because it’s a real small gym.”<\/p>\n
This year the competition includes Monroe Catholic, Thunder Mountain, Colony and Lathrop for the boys, and Monroe Catholic, Valdez, Colony and Lathrop for the girls. <\/p>\n
Seattle tourney<\/strong><\/p>\n Blasco called the four games in Seattle a great experience, even if things got off to a rocky start in the form of a 69-30 loss to Stanwood High School (Tacoma, Washington).<\/p>\n The Falcons were awarded the Randall Morris Sportsmanship Award out of 16 teams, and are much more attuned to how quickly a game can change — for better or worse.<\/p>\n After their setback against Stanwood, Thunder Mountain was on track for another double-digit loss to Cleveland High School (Seattle). However, “in about a four-minute stretch in the fourth quarter, we got the game to seven,” Blasco said. “You just realize how fast runs can happen in a game.”<\/p>\n Thunder Mountain went on to defeat New Port (Bellevue, Washington) and Summit Sierra (Seattle) to close out the tournament. All games were played at Franklin High School, a historic school near the downtown region.<\/p>\n Coming up soon<\/strong><\/p>\n The TMHS boys and girls and JDHS boys all play home series next weekend. The TMHS girls and boys take on Colony at 6:15 p.m. and 8 p.m., respectively. The JDHS boys will face Ketchikan at 8 p.m. on both Friday and Saturday.<\/p>\n The Juneau-Douglas girls return to action for the 2019 Ice Jam Tournament in Fairbanks starting next Thursday.<\/p>\n \u2022 Contact sports reporter Nolin Ainsworth at 523-2272 or nainsworth@juneauempire.com. Follow Empire Sports on Twitter at @akempiresports.<\/b><\/p>\n The Falcons boys basketball team is in Fairbanks. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":40794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,6],"tags":[203,222,321],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-40793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-sports","tag-sportbasketball","tag-high-school","tag-thunder-mountain-high-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40793"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=40793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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