The accolades continue to roll in for North Pole High School’s flag football team almost half a year after the Patriots won the state’s inaugural Alaska School Activities Association (ASAA)-sponsored Flag Football State Championships. Most recently, the members of the 34th Alaska State Legislature honored the Patriots for winning that first-ever state title with a signed certificate marked with the state seal.
“I think that it’s something that should be celebrated everywhere and anywhere,” North Pole co-head coach Jamie Darby said of the Patriots’ state title. “I talk about it as often as possible. To do something first doesn’t happen very often anymore. So to be a part of that is amazing, and it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So I’m really proud and excited to be a part of it.”
Being honored by the Alaska State Legislature is the latest accolade for a team that brought a state championship trophy back to the Interior for the first time since 2022 and sent two seniors to the first-ever NFL FLAG High School Girls Showcase at the 2025 NFL Pro Bowl Games in Orlando, Florida.
The USA TODAY Sports Super 25 flag football selection committee ranked the Patriots No. 8 nationally after a season in which more than half (eight) of their wins were shutouts.
At least one North Pole senior is continuing her flag football career at the collegiate level. Tiahna Guzman is headed to Bryant & Stratton College, a junior college program in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. She’ll join Darby’s daughter, Dakota, as one of a select few Alaskans to play flag football collegiately.
In 2022, North Pole finished winless. Just two years later, the Patriots went 15-1 and beat every team they played (the Patriots’ lone loss in 2024 came to Wasilla, but they beat the Warriors by two touchdowns one week later). Darby credits the year-over-year turnaround in part to a methodical “crawl, walk, run” style of learning, training for cold weather scenarios, watching plenty of film and emphasizing communication and accountability.
“Once they started being comfortable to communicate without fearing that somebody’s going to get mad or that they would take it and feel self-conscious or anything like that, once they broke through that, they just started clicking, and they started making things happen on the field,” Darby said.
“We were watching, and we’re like, ‘wait, that’s not totally the play, because they would start seeing an opening or a gap or they start manipulating.’ So the girls really got to see it from our viewpoint, and once they got there, they were able to just come together as a team.”
North Pole will have most of its state title-winning team back in 2025, headlined by starting quarterback Taimane Skipps and running back Jade Skipps, both of whom will be juniors.
Contact Gavin Struve at gstruve@newsminer.com or 907-459-7544
