A picture book and handprints, not the trophy.
That’s what made it all worthwhile for Dan Verkuilen and Brad Nyquist.
For Verkuilen, who retired in May after 25 seasons as head coach of the Kenai Central girls soccer team, it’s the picture book.
For Nyquist, who stepped down this year after 13 seasons as Kenai Central head ski coach and also served as Verkuilen’s soccer assistant since 2002, it’s the handprints.
The logical — and storybook — answer to what it made all the years of coaching worthwhile would have been the trophy — specifically the 2024 Division II girls state soccer hardware.
The first state championship for the Kardinals girls did not come easily.
Up until the 2018 season, Kenai Peninsula schools competed against all the other schools in the state in soccer.
Not only did peninsula schools have to defeat schools that were more than twice their size, but they also had to defeat players from areas with access to indoor soccer facilities — a massive advantage with Alaska’s short spring season.
No team from the peninsula won a state title under the single-division format, and only the 2016 Kenai Central boys even made it to the final.
In 2018, the Alaska School Activities Association went to the two-division format, making state titles more of a possibility.
The Kenai boys cashed in right away with Division II titles in 2018 and 2019.
Verkuilen thought he had the team to do it in 2020, but the season was canceled due to the pandemic.
The head coach thought the same in 2023, watching his team go 18-0 before losing in a penalty-kick shootout to archrival Soldotna in the state final, giving the Stars their first state title.
With it common knowledge — but not official — that Verkuilen and Nyquist were stepping down after the season, the Kardinals got sweet redemption in 2024.
Kenai fell behind Soldotna 1-0 in the state semifinals only to come back and claim a victory in a penalty-kick shootout. The Kardinals then stopped Juneau-Douglas: Yadaa.at Kale 2-0 in the final, with 2024 Kenai graduate Kylee Verkuilen — Dan’s daughter — scoring the first goal of the match.
What could be better than a state title like that to close a career, right?
“It was always something that would be cool, but that didn’t define me personally, and it wouldn’t have defined my coaching career or anything,” Verkuilen said. “You want it so bad for the kids.
“And when your daughter’s involved, of course you want it for her.”
Nyquist echoed those remarks.
“What we really wanted was for the kids to have that,” he said. “We want them to have that experience to carry through into their stories as part of their path in life.
“That’s the really meaningful part about having a state championship. It isn’t so much about being a coach and saying I’ve accomplished this. I don’t know. Maybe I’m past that.”
Verkuilen has a book of team pictures given to him after his last season. The book also includes artwork Verkuilen did for team T-shirts over the years.
“This kind of explains why you do it,” he said.
Verkuilen said he received emails to fill out forms for coaching awards since he retired.
“I didn’t do it. It just didn’t mean that much to me,” he said. “Like, that’s awesome I was voted for it by the site.
“But I know what the kids think.”
Nyquist gets a similar feeling from the wax shack at Kenai Central — a structure he fondly remembers coming together with school, student and community support to replace cramped and inadequate ski prep facilities in the high school.
“The kids, after they’re done, they put their handprints on that wax shack ceiling in paint, they put their name there,” Nyquist said. “Then they go and sign the wax bench when they’re a senior or exchange student.
“It’s pretty fun. I was looking at that when I was cleaning up the wax shack for the last time. And I have a memory, and I can put a face to every single kid, and something about them that was fun and unique.”
Peas and carrots
That Verkuilen and Nyquist ended up in the same place is no surprise, because they’ve been walking a similar path their entire lives.
“We just fit,” Nyquist said. “Like Forrest Gump says. Like peas and carrots.”
Nyquist grew up in northern Minnesota and it didn’t take him long to develop a love for coaching.
“My summer job right out of high school was I spent the whole day coaching baseball to a bunch of kids, and girls softball,” Nyquist said. “That’s what I did for eight hours a day was just coach.
“It just really filled me up and I found my happy place.”
That summer of 1977 was the first of over 60 seasons that Nyquist has spent coaching.
After graduating from the University of Minnesota Duluth, Nyquist went to California before coming to Alaska in 1986 to look for a job.
He said he toured every school district on the road system, but could find no takers for his physical education degree.
Nyquist did get an offer to teach math in Glennallen, but said he didn’t feel qualified. So he went back to California and then Duluth to get the math qualifications he needed to teach. During that period he also fell in love with and married his wife, fellow teacher Deb.
The two came to Alaska in the early 1990s ready to work.
“The competition was great,” Nyquist said. “I realized I really don’t have the experience teaching math, and we just needed more experience, and had to learn to sell ourselves better.”
The two regrouped in the Lower 48 before coming to the Kenai Peninsula. Both did substitute teaching, while Brad also worked in a cannery.
In December 1994, they were hired to split a teaching job in Chignik. Brad taught there and coached volleyball and basketball before Paul Sorenson, former Kenai Middle School principal, hired Brad for the 1997-98 school year. Brad would move to Kenai Central in the 2000-01 school year and teach there until retiring in 2023.
Soccer pioneer
A year prior to hiring Nyquist, Sorenson had given employment to another coaching nut with upper Midwest roots in Verkuilen.
After growing up in Wisconsin, Verkuilen attended high school in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Like Nyquist, Verkuilen got his coaching start in high school with youth baseball.
Soccer was Verkuilen’s passion, but the sport had not yet achieved much popularity in the United States. Eden Prairie did not have a high school soccer team until 1980, when a senior named Dan Verkuilen made it happen.
“I wanted a soccer team, so I actually went to the school board with my friends and we pitched it,” Verkuilen said. “I got the wrestling coach to help coach our team. It was very makeshift.”
The team made it all the way to state that first year and Verkuilen set a scoring record. He then went to the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, a nationally ranked program at the time, and was one of three out of 50 to be selected out of a walk-on tryout.
While he did more more sitting than playing at the school while studying biology and art, he was good enough that he returned to Minnesota in the summers to play semipro soccer.
After graduating, Verkuilen went back to Eden Prairie to coach the very team that he had started. He also coached downhill ski racing at that time.
“That’s when I kind of knew that I would enjoy working with kids,” he said. “So I went back to the University of Minnesota and got another science degree and my teaching certifications.”
In the spring of 1990, Verkuilen went to a job fair in St. Paul and landed a job in the Bush city of Wales.
“That’s when I headed up here, and I haven’t gone back,” he said.
In his three years in Wales and two years in Shaktoolik, Verkuilen said he coached everything. During that time, he started spending summers on the Kenai Peninsula and took a fly-out fishing trip, which led to him becoming a fishing guide in the summers.
“I did it one time just to give her a shot,” Verkuilen said of that first fly-out trip. “I decided, this is what I need to be doing.”
In the summer of 1995, Verkuilen moved to the Kenai Peninsula and got a part-time teaching job at Nikiski. There he met his wife, Cherrie, a state-title winning volleyball coach, and also picked up a few state titles himself as an assistant to wrestling head coach Steve Gillespie.
Verkuilen was hired by Sorenson in 1996 and taught there until retiring in 2020.
Soccer pioneer, Part II
Verkuilen said soccer in the United States grew not uniformly, but pocket by pocket. The Kenai Peninsula was about 20 years behind Minnesota.
When Verkuilen took over the Kenai girls in 1999, soccer was receiving funding as a varsity sport from the school district for the first time.
John Andrews, the former athletic director at Skyview High School, was a driving force in creating a Region III tournament that year for the first time. ASAA was a year away from sanctioning a state tournament.
When it came to finding coaches for the booming amount of kids yearning to play the game, the math didn’t add up. There would have to be a fair amount of coaches who had no soccer experience growing up.
“You had Dan Verkuilen, who knew soccer, and then you had all these other people like me, who were just learning,” Ken Felchle said.
Felchle was hired at Kenai Middle in 1996. Verkuilen coached the middle school girls and he quickly recruited Felchle to do the boys. It’s a job Felchle, the assistant principal at Kenai Middle, still has to this day.
“More and more kids were coming out, and they didn’t have any coaches,” Felchle said. “Dan’s like, ‘You need to do it.’ I’m like, ‘Dan, I don’t know anything about soccer. I’ve never played this game in my life.’
“He’s like, ‘No big thing. I’ll just teach you.’”
Another Verkuilen recruit was Nyquist in 2002. Nyquist said nobody had really even heard of soccer in the part of Minnesota where he grew up. The main base of popularity was the Minneapolis area.
“Both of our coaching philosophies are quite a bit the same,” Nyquist said. “He really cares about kids and their well-being.
“He just puts so much into making things better for them.”
Felchle, who would go on to coach varsity boys basketball at Kenai Central for 15 years, said he was fortunate to come to the district and learn from so many older coaches like Craig Jung, Jim Beeson, Erling Hofseth, Joe Trujillo and Verkuilen.
“It’s not just soccer, it’s how to build a relationship with a student-athlete,” Felchle said. “It’s a unique thing. You start out with a student-teacher relationship, then that becomes a student-athlete relationship, which is pretty tight.
“Eventually, these kids become your friend.”
Verkuilen said Nyquist was invaluable as an assistant because he was a liaison to the high school and could be trusted with kids.
“For him not to do his job eats him up,” Verkuilen said. “He’s that kind of guy, always has been. And then, of course, he became a dear friend.”
Putting Kenai soccer on the map
The Kenai girls made the first two years of the state tournament in 2000 and 2001. By 2006, the Kards had their first Region III crown.
Kenai qualified for state in 13 of 24 tries under Verkuilen. The Kards also won six region, or later conference, titles.
The success did not come without a lot of work just to get on the field in an Alaska “spring.” The challenge was particularly acute before 2014, when Kenai Central first got artificial turf.
Felchle said he has coached football, basketball, track, soccer, gymnastics and tennis. He said his least favorite task of all those coaching duties is to paint lines onto a soccer field.
Felchle still has to paint the lines on the middle school fields, but this year caught a break when a state comp soccer tournament meant he didn’t have to do the task.
Still, a call came from Verkuilen this spring asking if Felchle needed help painting fields.
“Wow. That right there tells you, No. 1, how much the game of soccer means to him, because he doesn’t want it to die,” Felchle said. “But it’s a service attitude. I’m here to serve my students, my athletes, my community of Kenai.”
Verkuilen said the community has helped him right back. While the turf is better than grass, clearing snow and ice each spring still takes a lot of effort. The City of Kenai has stepped up with snowblowers, and Verkuilen said Toad Vann deserves a mention for all the work he’s done with a Bobcat.
“Guys coming over with wheelbarrows, families buying food for the kids and even having them over to their house, it’s just nonstop,” Verkuilen said of community support. “I tried not to ask too much, but it was almost like, just ask and it happened, you know.”
Verkuilen, whose son, Travis, also went through the boys program, said it was that feeling of family that allowed the program to get the most out of players and have the success it had.
“Something that’s incredibly important to Dan and I is our faith,” Felchle said. “He displayed that to all his teams, and he was allowed to and never crossed any lines, never forced anything down anybody’s throat.
“He just showed compassion and love every day for his players, and he encouraged me to do the same. If you were to ask me, that’s the greatest gift he ever game me.”
Felchle said the reason Nyquist and Verkuilen worked so well together is because they realized the most important thing in coaching is the relationship with the kids. If the sport is the most important thing a coach has taught the athletes, that coach has failed.
Processing oxygen
Already teaching, coaching girls soccer and middle school running, and raising children April, Anders and Kirsten with wife, Deb, Brad Nyquist decided to increase his workload and further an old passion even more in 2007 when he became assistant ski coach at Kenai Central under head coach D’Anna Ham.
Nyquist said he started skiing at about 7 years old on a pair of his dad’s skis that were about 7 feet tall and 5 inches wide.
“I started skiing when skis were made out of nothing but wood and they had a leather strap going through with a buckle on it,” Nyquist said. “And you put your winter boots on and you put them in that strap.”
By 2011, Nyquist had taken over as head ski coach and also stopped coaching middle school running.
“It was quite an adjustment to family structure, because I was not just gone on the weekends, but you don’t get home until six on the weeknights and that puts a strain on your work day,” Nyquist said.
The coach said all the time he’s spent on a bus could get him around the world pretty easily, but added there are subtler ways coaching skiing takes up time.
Isaac Erhardt has been the head coach at Soldotna for six years and assistant for 12, so he has gotten to know Nyquist and his habit for pouring time into the sport.
Take waxing skis for a race.
“There would be times where I’ll be like, ‘I’m just calling it,’” Erhardt said. “I’d look over at Brad, and he’d be like, ‘Well, I’m going to be waxing until midnight or two in the morning.
“He’d just go all in on it. I’d be like, ‘How do you do that?’”
Alex Serventi also got to see Nyquist’s work ethic up close. Serventi is the same age as Kirsten Nyquist, so Serventi spent time in the Nyquist home growing up.
Serventi’s parents, Mike and Chris Bergholtz, were longtime ski assistants for Nyquist. Serventi was taught by Nyquist as a freshman and skied for him for four years.
She said coaching skiing is a unique challenge because appropriate snow conditions for a race or practice are never a guarantee.
“My sophomore or junior year, we barely had any snow, and Brad would take us to the refuge and we would either ice skate or ski on the lake, because there was no snow on the trail,” Serventi said. “Being tough like that, problem-solving, and still having a good mood is pretty impressive.”
Nyquist said he even wondered himself if sometimes he was putting in too much time, particularly when he was grooming the Kenai Nordic Trails late at night with an obsession with getting the tracks perfect.
He said what kept him going is a love for skiing and a love for seeing skiers improve, no matter what level they started and finished at.
“The thing that sticks out to me is when we would do something together, whether it be meets or practices, Brad would always zip over with a big smile on his face and he would make some comment like, ‘It feels good to be processing oxygen,’” Erhardt said.
Serventi is now a teacher at Soldotna and helps out with coaching cross-country running, skiing and track.
“He celebrated everyone equally, which I think is hard to do as a coach,” Serventi said. “I try to do that as well.
“The other thing that Brad does, and I would say that all Kenai coaches are great at this, is they don’t just celebrate their team’s success, they celebrate SoHi’s team success, too.”
Nyquist had skiers achieve at a high level in a state where the ski programs in the big cities regularly produce Olympians.
In 2015, Travis Cooper won the classic race at the state meet, beating out future Olympians Gus Schumacher and Luke Jager.
Nyquist’s girls teams were the top Division II squad at state from 2021 to 2024, and the boys took that honor in 2021, 2022 and 2024.
He said he’ll always remember skiers like Jack Laker, Chase Laker, Greg Fallon, Zane Tews and Emily Moss that led that last title push, but other handprints hold a special place in his heart as well.
Nyquist said a special treat was watching foreign exchange students progress. He tells the story of a student from Mexico at the Candy Cane Scramble.
“He had never seen snow before, never been on snow, never been on skis,” Nyquist said. “He comes and stands next to me, all puffed up, and says, ‘Coach, it was pretty awesome today.’
“I go, ‘Oh, why so?’ ‘I didn’t fall once, and it was fun.’ And he was just beaming. He just felt so happy with himself, and it was great to feel those accomplishments of a young person.”
Nyquist said it took a whole community to make experiences like that possible — from trail groomers, to volunteers at the meets, to all the people that make fundraising events like the Kenai Ski Swap, Black Stone Axe Ridge Warm Up Rally and cleaning the beach during dipnet season possible.
He said the goal is to get kids to enjoy skiing so they still want to ski after graduating.
Erhardt said a prime example is a dual meet SoHi and Kenai would hold around Valentine’s Day.
“Instead of being, like, ‘All right, we’re cracking the whip here. We’re getting close to big races,’ we’d say, ‘Just go and ski,’” Erhardt said. “Brad, I and the other coaches would sneak off and set up a bonfire, get hot chocolate, cookies and hot dogs for the kids, just to try and make it something fun and memorable.
“It’s definitely all about the adventure.”
Next up
Both Verkuilen and Nyquist said they are open to continuing to help out with the programs and the new coaches, but both also made clear they are done being head coaches.
That leaves Kenai athletic director Jesse Settlemyer, who came to the school in 2014 and has been the athletic director for seven years, with some big shoes to fill.
Thus far, a head coach has not been hired for skiing or girls soccer.
“They are first-class coaches, and they wanted the best for their athletes,” Settlemyer said.
Common threads that stood out to Settlemyer are the care the coaches had for student-athletes, and the willingness to go above and beyond the normal tasks of a coach.
He said Verkuilen, in addition to all the snow removal, helped build benches for teams on the sidelines of Ed Hollier Field.
“He was involved in getting them welded, and a couple of years ago he replaced all of the wood on them and repainted them on his own time,” Settlemyer said.
Settlemyer said Verkuilen also was involved with getting the ball wall erected between the high school and middle school so players had a place to practice. Last year, Kylee Verkuilen even repainted the wall as part of a senior civics project.
The athletic director said one season there was no snow and Nyquist could feel his skiers were getting more and more anxious for some real skiing.
“So he called up the City of Kenai, got a hold of the Kenai rink, and he asked if we could use the shavings from the Zamboni,” Settlemyer said. “And if we could get a front end loader to bring over the shavings from the Kenai rink.
“After a couple of days, he had enough Zamboni shavings that he was able to build a trail over here, so his kids could at least get out and start to ski a little bit.”
Settlemyer said new coaches will be hired, but the mark left by Verkuilen and Nyquist is indelible.
“I’m not sure there’s any way we can completely replace the impact of either Dan or Brad,” Settlemyer said. “Their impact is going to go long beyond their time at Kenai Central, with all the students and athletes that they had an impact on in both sports.”
