From Alaska to Oregon: Students Experience the 2025 NAME Conference
reprinted from NW Compass, the newsletter of the Northwest Aquatic and Marine Educators (NAME)
The Ketchikan National Ocean Sciences Bowl team, also known as the Saber-Toothed Salmon, is a competition based high school group that focuses on ocean related knowledge in Alaska and beyond. While we are always directly preparing our students for our competition, we are also looking for creative and unique opportunities to immerse our students in, to prepare them for life after high school. Our coaches stumbled upon the NMEA entity in the summer of 2024 when we were invited to the National Conference in Boston, MA. We were immediately hooked with NMEA and wanted to get involved more. During this conference, we found that various regional groups were formed and convened on an annual basis as well, with NAME being in our jurisdiction. With the regional conference being located in Newport, OR our coaching staff thought it would be prudent to get our students involved as well. With support from Fawn Custer and Jennifer Magnusson, we were able to bring eight of our students from our little island community in Alaska to Oregon for the NAME conference in 2025.
One of our primary objectives for making the trip down was to spread awareness of the National Ocean Sciences Bowl competition. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, school participation across the country in our competition plummeted. Our team found it prudent that we support the competition by recruiting new schools into our competition so we can continue competing in the future. So in partnership with Lindsey Carroll from Oregon State University, we put together a joint presentation on the benefits of having a National Ocean Sciences Bowl team at local high schools. Lindsey put together a slideshow on what it takes to get a team started, I put together some slides on what my experience has been as a coach, and my students did a mock quiz bowl in front of a live audience to give an idea of what we do for our competition. Our presentation was well attended and the audience asked my students questions about their experiences. An overall success in my opinion.
During our time at the NAME conference, our students also took in other presentations from other educators. While this conference is primarily for us adults, our students learned a lot from these presentations. Some of our students are considering a year in education down the road, so those students especially took advantage of this opportunity. The NAME conference also provided our students with the opportunity to learn about Oregon Coast Marine Science. We toured the Otter Rock Marine Reserve, Yaquina Head Lighthouse & Museum, the Sea Lion Caves, the Hatfield Marine Science Center, and the Oregon Coast Aquarium. All of these learning opportunities had a profound impact on our students. For many of our students, this was their first time in Oregon and it opened their eyes to the world outside of Alaska. One other amazing opportunity that we were able to take advantage of during our free time in Oregon was touring the campuses of Oregon State University in Corvallis and the University of Oregon in Eugene. Our students on this trip were juniors and seniors, all with aspirations of going to college after high school. Some of these students had these two universities on their list of potential schools they were interested in going to, so being able to tour the campuses was very valuable for our group.
Overall, our group had an amazing time at the NAME conference. Our students made memories that are going to last them a lifetime, so we are incredibly thankful for the opportunity to attend. However, none of this would have been possible without the support from NAME and the Bill “Sean” Hastie Conference Scholarship for providing funds to support travel expenses for our group. Travel from Alaska to Oregon in the middle of the summer is expensive, and for a public school such as ourselves, fundraising opportunities are limited. This scholarship allowed this trip to happen for us without having to ask students’ families to pay out of pocket. So, from our coaching staff and team, we would like to thank those involved with the scholarship committee for selecting our group to receive those funds!
