4A Girls Championship | The Standard Meets the Hunger | March Madness Alaska 2026
Saturday, March 21, 2026 | UAA Alaska Airlines Center
Before the season started, some of the Bartlett squad came into the Prospect studio for preseason interviews. Stored away in the studio was a basketball signed by Mia 'Uhila and her 2021 championship teammates. 'Uhila is now an assistant coach at UAA — her Bartlett years a foundation piece of a successful college career that brought her back home. Nobody staged the moment. The ball was just there, and so were they.
Two generations of Bartlett basketball in the same room. Today, the current Golden Bears play for a state title.
On the other side of the bracket, a program that already knows what that feels like — and spent two years watching someone else cut the nets.
When it was Anchorage Christian Schools, before the 2023 rebrand to Mountain City Christian Academy, the Lions built something that had never been done in this state. Under coach Chad Dyson, ACS won six consecutive state titles — four at 3A, then the first two after being forced up to 4A. Their in-state winning streak reached 116 consecutive games, the longest in Alaska history. At the center of it was Sayvia Sellers — two-time Gatorade Player of the Year, Alaska's all-time leading scorer, now at the University of Washington.
When Sellers graduated after the 2023 title, the window shifted. The first season without her, Wasilla beat MCCA four times and took the title — led by Layla Hays, now at Iowa, and Mylee Anderson, now at UAA. Colony won it in 2025. Two years without a title for a program that had won six straight.
Then Lonnie Ridgeway arrived.
The former UAA standout and 2006 Class 3A Player of the Year — who led Heritage Christian to back-to-back state titles as a player — was appointed head coach at MCCA in July 2024. In his second year, he has the Lions synced up and playing together the way this program expects. The results show it. MCCA enters today's championship 27-3 as the top seed. Keelie Kronberger, Jasmine Schaeffer, and Brooklynn Ridgeway have each established their roles and been at the center of everything the Lions have done this season. Kronberger — the Gatorade Player of the Year and an Oral Roberts signee — dropped 45 in the quarterfinal, held without a three for three quarters in the semifinal before breaking free when it mattered most. This is the year MCCA believes the standard comes back.
Bartlett has a different relationship with this moment. Coach Clarence Smith ended 43 years of waiting with the 2021 title — the program's first since 1978. Darian Lawson was on that staff. When he took over as head coach, he rebuilt the program in his own image. Back-to-back CIC titles. A standard his players describe as college level. When Lawson needed his team most last year, they showed up. The bond that formed didn't leave the gym.
Kennedi Gaines is the product of that standard. The sophomore co-CIC Player of the Year had multiple Division I offers before she played a varsity game. She had five steals in Friday's semifinal, the last one a pull-up three with 44 seconds left that ended the night. She is the most visible part of a program that has been building toward exactly this.
MCCA is here to reclaim what they built. Bartlett is here to add the next chapter to a legacy still being written. One game. Same floor. Today.
4A Girls Championship — MCCA vs Bartlett | Saturday, March 21, 2026
