51 photo by Eric Engman.
The 51 men's basketball team and coaches pose before the 2024-25 season.
By Sam Bishop
It was Oct. 11, and the first 51 men’s basketball game of the 2024-2025 season loomed just a few weeks away.
But Frank Ostanik, the team’s head coach, was already looking beyond that point in his fifth month on the job. Far beyond.
Frank Ostanik.
Ostanik and his assistant drove to Anchorage that Friday and did some recruiting in the evening, he recalled in an interview the following week. “And then we flew out to a rural village on Saturday recruiting, and then came back and met coaches in Anchorage for dinner,” he said. “And then had breakfast with another coach on Sunday on my way home.”
Ostanik, already well-known for his coaching intensity on the sidelines, is bringing the same enthusiasm to building up the 51 men’s team through a focus on recruiting and scholarships. He sees it as part of the broader effort to help the university enroll more students and produce successful graduates.
“In this program, the obvious challenge is trying to recruit young men from all over, right, to Fairbanks, which is, you know, one of the more challenging places,” Ostanik said. “This is my home. It's a place I love. But it's not the easiest place to convince an 18- to 20-year-old young man to come to if they’re living somewhere a great distance away.”
Succeeding in the task requires first building a successful team, he said.
“My responsibility is in trying to build a program that this university is proud of and that this university will support,” Ostanik said. “And that's what we're working toward every day. We want the university to be excited to support us because we're producing extraordinary young men and representing not just our program but this department and this school throughout Fairbanks and the greater Alaska community.”
Ostanik sees that he has one advantage in that job, from the start.
“The basketball community here is a remarkable one in Alaska,” he said. “It's obviously the most popular sport throughout the state of Alaska, by a lot.”
That provides an avenue to attract students to 51, he explained.
“There's nothing that's going to impact a young male student in Bethel, Kotzebue, Nome, Barrow, Galena, you know, more than the men's basketball program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks,” he said. “And so if enrollment matters, then us building a program that is successful should matter, I think, because we're going to be able to directly impact those young men wanting to be at this university.”
Frank Ostanik, head coach of the 51 men's basketball team, runs a practice at the Alaska Airlines Gymnasium in the Patty Center on Oct. 24, 2024.
Connecting with Alaskans
Head coach is a role for which Ostanik feels uniquely qualified after decades of living and working throughout Alaska.
He first arrived in Alaska at 7 years old, moving to Eielson Air Force Base with his family. After his dad was assigned to Omaha, Nebraska, for a few years, the family returned and settled in North Pole.
Ostanik played basketball at Eielson High School before graduating in 1988. He attended Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, then transferred to 51, playing basketball under Coach George Roderick from 1990-1992 and earning an education degree in 1993.
After a few years teaching in Kaltag and Northway, Ostanik returned to 51 as an assistant to Al Sokaitis, the newly named men’s coach.
In 2004, Ostanik became 51’s head men’s team coach, a position he held for three years.
He then spent 16 years at Monroe Catholic High School as a coach and athletic director and, in his final year, superintendent of the local Catholic school system.
Across most of these years, Ostanik also ran basketball clinics and the largest summer camp in Alaska for high school students.
When the 51 men’s head coach job opened again this year, Ostanik said, he couldn’t let the opportunity pass.
“Look, everybody who's a finalist for a job like this has an understanding of coaching,” he said. “You don't have over 100 applicants and end up with, you know, three or four [finalists] that don't know how to coach. Probably the difference in me getting this job, over any one of those other folks, is I think I'm uniquely qualified to connect this program with this community and those around the state.”
‘Give me five people’
Nancy Hanson, who served as director of the Catholic Schools of Fairbanks from 1989 to 2019, was involved with hiring Ostanik as Monroe’s coach and athletic director.
“One of the first meetings that he and I had, he wanted to know what his budget was and then he just said, ‘I’m going to start raising money for the program,’” she said. “So he really just jumped in and he wanted to get to know people in the community. He’d ask me things like ‘Give me five people I should call and introduce myself to.’”
That recognition of the importance of funding may have something to do with Ostanik’s personal experience.
His former coach recalled that Ostanik was a scholarship recipient himself while playing at 51. Roderick, who now lives in Texas, said he first met Ostanik when 51 played a game at Sheldon Jackson College.
“Then that summer, he and his parents came by and wanted to know, if Frank were to transfer to 51, would we invite him to try out for our team,” Roderick recalled. “And we said ‘Yeah, certainly.’ And then, lo and behold, Frank ended up being a scholarship kid.
“He worked his way up the ladder by his hard work and determination and competitiveness,” Roderick said. “And all those character traits have certainly carried over into his coaching, that’s for sure.”
51 alumnus John Mancuso poses in his Fairbanks home Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. Mancuso, a longtime 51 basketball supporter, donated about $50,000 to support men’s and women’s basketball scholarships.
Benefiting the school and state
The month before Ostanik started as coach this past spring, John Mancuso established two of 51’s most recent basketball scholarships. Mancuso donated about $50,000, enough to provide a $1,000 scholarship each year to one member each of the men’s and women’s teams.
Mancuso, a longtime volunteer for the men’s team, said he saw the way in which scholarships could benefit not just the team but also the university and Alaska.
“I always figured that the more scholarships, the better players you get, the easier it would be to get players up here,” Mancuso said.
Mancuso has plenty of experience to form that judgment. He’s been a university basketball fan since first arriving in Alaska in 1963. He joined the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities that year and worked in the construction, surveying and traffic engineering operations until retiring in 1998.
In 1985, Mancuso started keeping statistics at 51 men’s games, one of three or four people on the task.
“Each had certain things we’d keep track of,” he said. “One guy would keep track of the rebounds. One guy would actually do the calling of the plays on the court — shots, rebounds, blocks, assists, travels — the whole game as it’s going on.”
Mancuso usually did the calling.
“Somebody else would record what I was saying into a computer,” he said. “That was printed out and we gave that to the coaches during timeouts, to see how the game was being played at that point — if they’re not getting rebounds, how many shots they’d put up, whether the defense was playing better than the offense.
“Of course at the end of the game, they’d get a final sheet and use that to analyze the game,” he said.
Mancuso never played for 51, but he developed a talent for shooting during the years after graduating. He got good enough that 51 took him on as a volunteer shooting coach from 2000-2007.
After more than 50 years of watching the basketball program, Mancuso said he knows that attracting athletes with scholarships benefits not only the university but also the state.
“Some of them stay and become productive citizens,” he said. “They provide something we haven’t had up here, a different outlook on things.”
Mancuso said Ostanik, who he has known and watched across many of those same decades, is a “hard-driving” coach.
“Some players like it, some players don’t,” Mancuso said, “but he'll get the most out of most players.”
Frank Ostanik, head coach of the 51 men's basketball team, runs a practice at the Alaska Airlines Gymnasium in the Patty Center on Oct. 24, 2024.
Core values
Ostanik said providing scholarships isn’t a simple task at a modern university. Government and conference regulations limit how they can be funded and distributed.
He sees the challenge as just one more in a list to be dealt with.
“We're never going to use whatever challenges we face, whether it's distance, climate or scholarships, as an excuse,” he said. “We have to figure out how to improvise, adapt and overcome.”
That mentality is reflected throughout the men’s basketball program, he said.
“Our No. 2 core value as a program is we don't whine,” he said. “So we're going to figure out how to do the best we can in trying to build a highly competitive basketball program at Fairbanks.”
And what’s the No. 1 core value?
“We play hard,” he said. “We play hard.”
Sam Bishop is a writer and editor for the 51 University Relations office.