Mars alum Krock helps Anchorage to NAHL final
When Keith Morris took over as the director of hockey operations for the North American Hockey League expansion Anchorage Wolverines, he didn’t have anything to work with.
But it didn’t take him long to find a linchpin around which to build the organization.
“When we got the franchise and I came on board, I got a call from a very good friend of mine,” Morris said. “He said you’ve got no draft picks, you’ve got no tenders, but you’ve got to get this kid.”
That kid was forward and Mars native Jackson Krock.
After meeting with Morris at a tournament in Pittsburgh, Krock signed a tender and became the first member of the Wolverines NAHL team.
“I actually signed a contract the day the team was announced,” Krock said. “It was cool being the first person to sign. It was also cool to kind of come here and be a part of something new and putting a team on the map.”
He did a lot more than that. The Wolverines’ 21 -year-old assistant captain helped the team win the Midwest Division in its first season and helped the team to the Robertson Cup championship game Tuesday against the New Jersey Titans. Anchorage lost in the Robertson Cup final, 3-0, at Fogerty Ice Arena in Blaine, Minn. The Wolverines were hoping to become the first expansion team to win the title since the Compuware Ambassadors in 1986.
This year he scored six goals and 20 points in 51 games during the regular season and chipped in a goal and two assists in the first nine games of the playoffs.
“When we got him, I told out coach Mike Aikens that we’ve got an unbelievable kid here who’s going to make us better every day. We’re just blessed to have him,” Morris said. “He looked at it as an opportunity to live in Alaska for a year and help build something from the ground up.”
Before moving to Alaska, Krock had spent the previous two seasons playing in Foxboro, Mass., for the South Shore Kings of the National Collegiate Development Conference, the same organization Penguins defenseman John Marino once played.
Prior to leaving for Boston, he played his senior season with the Mars High School program. In his one year with the Planets, in 2018-19, he scored 19 goals and 36 points in 17 games and was selected to play in the PIHL Class 2A all-star game.
“It was a lot of fun playing high school,” Krock said. “It wasn’t something I really thought of playing for the Pens Elite, but I had a lot of fun with it and I really enjoyed the high school hockey experience.”
After leaving Mars, he spent two years with the Kings and scored nine goals and 22 assists in 83 career games. But moving four time zones from the Boston suburbs to Anchorage took a period of adjustment.
“It’s definitely a different way of life. I find people to be very friendly in Alaska,” Krock said. “People are very proud of where they’re from and it’s a very tight-knit community. It’s the largest city in Alaska, but it’s very small at the same time.”
There’s also a much tighter focus on the junior team in Anchorage than
there was in the Northeast.
Outside of the University of Alaska-Anchorage program, there really isn’t any other hockey team above the high school level aside from the Wolverines. At one point, the city had a Kelly Cup championship ECHL team in the Alaska Aces, but the organization folded operations after the 2016-17 season.
Add to that the novelty of a first-year franchise that ended up playing for a championship and you essentially
have a junior hockey version of the Las Vegas Golden Knights in their first season in the NHL.
“We were the talk of the town because the University of Alaska-Anchorage went down because of COVID and just got their team back for this year,” Krock said. “We were kind of the main show in town and we got a lot of love from the community.”
He’ll certainly get a change of pace next season. Instead of long flights on
Alaska Airlines — which is one of the Wolverines top sponsors — he’ll be taking a lot of bus trips around the Northeast when he heads to Hamilton College in Upstate New York to play for the Continentals.
“It’s a very competitive conference, I toured there last summer and it’s been my plan to go there since I played for South Shore,” Krock said. “That’s my plan moving forward for my four years of college.”