Della Churchill sits in the high school wrestling room on March 5. For Churchill's senior project, she chose to serve as assistant coach for the middle school wrestling team. The opportunity let her not only inspire future high school wrestlers but spend a couple extra months in the room she loves.
She loves its water, its plants, its people. She loves the community she's cultivated here, and she loves the personal history of which it reminds her. From tight matches on the wrestling mat to even tighter bonds connecting her with loved ones, Churchill is certain: After college, she's coming home to Wrangell.
But before she does that, she needs to graduate high school - and to do that, she needs a senior project. For that, Churchill helped coach the middle school wrestling team alongside her longtime high school coach Jack Carney.
The two-month middle school season constituted five-day-a-week practices and two trips: one to Juneau and another to Sitka. While Churchill knew she wanted to coach wrestling for her senior project, she initially bounced between coaching the middle school team or coaching the elementary school team.
"I just ultimately decided on the middle school so that I could still be in that wrestling room for a little bit longer and still hang out with Carney a little bit more," she laughed.
Churchill spent the past four years dominating in the wrestling room. She not only placed at state the past three years but finished the season as the Southeast champion in each of those seasons. For Churchill, the senior project gave her an opportunity to give back to a program that formed her.
"If the kids were feeling down in a match ... I could make them look at me and tell them that they can do it," she said. "And then they just snap out of it ... It's really cool to see that happen."
As for what surprised her, Churchill said that on meet days, she found herself getting so caught up in the nonstop nature of coaching that she often forgot to eat.
"You quickly lose your voice as a coach," she said. "You forget that you have to eat! You'll have a small 10 minutes of relaxing time, and you realize, 'Wait, I'm actually really hungry.'"
But Churchill is no stranger to a wall-to-wall schedule. From a young age, she's always kept busy. She's played pretty much every sport Wrangell has to offer and as she's grown up, she rarely finds herself without something to do.
March is the first month since the wrestling season began that Churchill will be without a structured activity after school. But she's already working on alleviating that: As soon as the middle school wrestling season concluded, she texted her boss to see if she could pick up more shifts. She also recently joined the school's BASE Club, an inclusivity-focused student organization run by Mikki Angerman.
After graduation, she plans on studying business administration at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Better yet, Churchill already knows what she wants to do with the degree: come back to Wrangell and work in hospital administration.
"While I'm working at the hospital, I'm going to take online classes to get my master's and then hopefully work my way up to hospital administration of our regional facility."
It's obvious and apparent, but Churchill likes to plan ahead. She contains an unrelenting internal monologue that walks her through every single step of whatever task needs completed.
"I'm always like boom, boom, boom," she said. "I love thinking about what I have to do over and over again, because then I don't forget, and I get done what I need to get done."
This mindset, though involuntary for Churchill, has been crucial for her success in the wrestling room. For example, a lot of the elite high school wrestlers Churchill faces try a move called the Russian Tie - or a Russian. But given the difficulty and rarity of the move, Churchill does not get to practice defending against it as often as she would hope. But thanks to that ever-churning internal monologue, she can map out the steps for when the time comes to defend herself.
"One option to get out of a Russian is to push your opponent's head down and get your head in their temple," she said. Flex your arm, peel the top hand away and peel off."
But that doesn't mean she's incapable of improvisation. Once, when facing off against Ketchikan's Meg Thompson, she invented her own evasive maneuver.
When Thompson went for the Russian, Churchill responded. Ever the student, she - of course - memorized every step of her counter. Churchill reached through Thompson's arm and grabbed ahold of her, she stepped her left leg in front of the Ketchikan wrestler, tripped her, and flipped her on her back.
"It was just instinct! I don't know," she said.
Churchill's knack for planning ahead isn't arbitrary. She isn't trying to just fill her schedule just to keep a full schedule; she does it in accordance with her enthusiasms.
She loves the outdoors, a passion blossomed from countless days spent on her dad's fishing boat. So, when it came to getting a job, working as a tour guide for Alaska Waters made complete sense. For the past two years, Churchill has been taking guests on botanical tours. It should come as no surprise that Churchill has built up quite the repertoire of plant facts. ("Hemlocks make up 70% of the trees in our forest," she told me when I asked for a fun plant fact.)
When Churchill's time in Colorado is finished, she knows there's nowhere else calling her back. The hemlocks and the muskeg, the November days muddled by rain and the frigid February mornings without a cloud in the sky, Wrangell will always be her home.
And part of that reason: Wrangell keeps her close to her father. Della's dad, Randy Churchill Jr., suddenly passed away in February 2023.
"I feel my dad here a lot," she said. "I love to talk about my dad and keep his memory alive. When I talk about him, then other people get to think about him. And I get to think about his amazing stories."
After Randy passed away, the Wrangell community rallied around the Churchills - a gratitude that Della hopes to reciprocate in working at the hospital. She sees the hospital as a place where people help people, something of which she hopes to be part.
"I want to work in the hospital, but I don't want to deal with blood and guts," she said. "Everybody needs something there. It's about healing people and taking care of them. And that's why I want to do it."
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