Donna Cooley, right, has a 12-year-old who plays hockey and houses a player for the Alaska Avalanche, an amateur team in Wasilla. 
WASILLA, Alaska: Like many parents here in the communities near Anchorage, Sarah Palin raised her older children in hockey rinks.
Powered on white mochas and an aerobics class or two, Palin, now the governor of Alaska and the Republican nominee for vice president, would drive to rinks at all hours, children in tow. She sometimes ran the scoreboard, let hockey players from other cities sleep on the floor of her home and got involved in the management of her eldest son's teams.
But last Friday night, two longtime and once promising young players — Palin's eldest, Track, and her soon to be son-in-law, Levi Johnston — were absent from the hockey arena in Wasilla as the coaches made the final cuts for the new season of the area's elite amateur team, the Alaska Avalanche.
Track Palin, 19, is being deployed this week to Iraq with the army, after separating his shoulder and abruptly giving up on a hockey career last year. Johnston, 18, who is about to become a father, has dropped out of Wasilla High School and also quit hockey.
"He just lost his way," said Dan Johnston, who is a second cousin to Johnston and a hockey parent himself.
Although hockey players enjoy a reputation as rowdy partiers at many high schools, the sport often keeps children here on the straight and narrow, much the way football and basketball do in other places. When Dan Johnston sold raffle tickets for his son's team, his sales slogan was, "Help keep the kids on the ice and off the streets."
But hockey can also be a roiling pressure cooker, full of big expectations and even bigger disappointments, especially across south-central Alaska where the sport is highly competitive and many parents harbor hopes that their children might get a college scholarship and maybe even make it to the National Hockey League.
If football dominates Friday nights in rural Texas, hockey dominates here.
"All of us basically raise our kids here from August to March," said Donna Cooley, who has an out-of-town Avalanche player as a boarder and a 12-year-old son who plays. "We call the kids 'rink rats,' and we all miss each other when the season ends."
To understand hockey in Alaska is to understand something about the Palin family dynamic: Athletic drive seems to be as much a family trait as churchgoing and salmon fishing.
Palin's father was a popular cross-country coach. She was a high school basketball star who married Todd Palin, a high school jock who has remained an athlete as an adult. Palin is a four-time winner of the Iron Dog snowmobile race, something akin to Nascar elsewhere in terms of its local celebrity.
Wasilla's four-year-old sports complex, where the Avalanche and other teams play, is a $15 million legacy from the days when Palin was mayor. The house that Sarah built — named after one of her best friends who died in a plane crash — was secured with a sales tax increase. And even before Track Palin was in elementary school, his parents had him on skates.
In more rural parts of the state, where gyms instead of hockey rinks were built with the rush of oil money in the 1980s, basketball is the favored sport. But in and around Anchorage, particularly in wealthier high schools, hockey is everything.
With $400 skates, $150 sticks and hundreds of dollars more for pads and gloves, outfitting a skater can cost well over $1,000. Add in ice time, league fees and the cost of travel in and out of this state, and some families with elite high school players can spend $15,000 a year.
Parents with especially talented skaters or with enough money or both often do what the Palins eventually did with Track Palin: Write a check and send him to hockey development programs out of state. Housed with teammates, the boys go to local high schools and play on sponsored teams intended to attract attention from college recruiters.
In 2006, the year Palin was elected governor, Steve Lowe snatched up Track Palin for a slot on the developmental AAA team he coaches in Kalamazoo, Michigan Lowe liked that Palin, a forward, was extremely focused and aggressive on the ice. If he could manage his temper a little and improve his shooting, it was clear that Palin could have secured a college scholarship and maybe a chance at the pros, he said.
The temper was a longstanding problem. Hockey is a raw sport, but Palin pushed the limits and often got kicked out of games in Wasilla and at least once in Michigan. The parents who had watched him grow up on the ice said he was popular with his teammates and generally a pretty good student. But on the ice, he was an animal.
Curt Menard, a longtime family friend, said he would often sit next to Palin's parents to watch their grandson play. If Menard arrived after the game started, he said, he would ask if he was too late to catch him.
"Track has a temper so sometimes you'd only see him half the game," Menard said. "Get there late and he'd already be out."
Whatever his behavior on the ice, Palin's parents did not meddle, Lowe said.
"There are some hockey moms who live their dream through their son," he said. "Sarah wasn't like that. She pretty much loved to watch her son and was engulfed with his level of play, but she let me coach."
Meanwhile, Levi Johnston was following the path set by Track Palin and other recent Wasilla High School students. He was part of a generation of players who were finally getting enough skill to challenge the teams from better-off schools in South Anchorage. Although people here say the Palins and Johnstons were not particularly close, the families became connected in part by hockey.
Adele Morgan, a longtime friend of Palin's, said that she would ask her what was going on between Johnston and Palin's eldest daughter, Bristol, and that Palin would say they were just friends. But people at the hockey rink said they had been dating for well over a year.
Last week, Palin announced that Bristol Palin, 17, was five months pregnant and that she and Johnston were engaged to be married.
Johnston was considered a very good player, though not as good as Palin. He was tough, playing the last game of Wasilla High School's season in February, while a junior, with a cracked tibia.
Dan Johnston, the second cousin, said Levi Johnston felt pressure to perform in the rink and clashed with his father over hockey several times. "He threw all his gear in the burn pile once," Dan Johnston said.
In the end, hockey did not work for Levi Johnston. His grades slipped, he left school and he quit playing altogether.
The dream for Track Palin unraveled, too, starting when he separated his shoulder in Michigan. By March 2007, he was back with his family and that spring graduated from Wasilla High School. He had shoulder surgery, and the Avalanche offered him a playing slot, said the team's general manager, Jamie Smith.
But that summer, Smith said, Track Palin called him and said that his shoulder was not better and that he was going to enlist in the army instead.
Palin 's coach in Michigan, Lowe, said he thought the shoulder was fine.
"He talked to me about that," Lowe said. "I said, 'Are you sure, Track?' He said, 'They want me to play, coach, but this is what I want to do.' "
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