All roads lead to Bangor in mid-February in Maine for the annual Maine High School Basketball Tournament. You’d be hard-pressed to hear any grumblings about the aging Bangor Auditorium, parquet floor, and acoustics from the players—they’re just thrilled to be here.
What started back in 1922 has turned into a tradition for die-hard fans from as far away as Fort Kent. For the past 26 years, Bill Fletcher has led the charge as the codirector of the event that pits the best teams in the East and West divisions against each other.
“The basketball tournament is the biggest event in Bangor every winter,” Fletcher says. “I bet there’s millions of dollars that come into this city during the week.” The Bangor Auditorium is great for basketball, Fletcher says. “The crowds are right into the game— close to the action, lots of noise, and the kids on the floor can hear it.”
Bangor is home to most of the eastern regional division playoff games—the quarterfinals, the semifinals, followed by the regional finals. The western areas of Maine play in Portland and Augusta. The weekend after February break ends, those East and West school winners compete in all three cities for the coveted Gold Ball and the honor of being the state champion.
The Bangor tournament brings high school athletes from all over eastern and northern Maine—along with their fans, who, depending on the school, can number in the hundreds. School spirit fills the stands, from the signs and face paint to the school bands and cheerleaders.
“We’ll do a cheer and then the other team will do a cheer,” says Chelsey Coburn, a Medomak Valley High School cheerleader. “It’s so much fun. We get the crowd pumping, and the teams, they love it.”
Crowds come to cheer on their hometown, and when rival teams hit the court, the stands are often packed to the top of the auditorium. Calais and Washington Academy, Fort Fairfield and Central Aroostook, Washburn and Southern Aroostook are all longtime rivals. So are Ellsworth and MDI, Camden Hills and Medomak Valley. The Jonesport-Beals and Deer Isle-Stonington game always garners a sea of spectators as well.
“It’s a great feeling, it’s just awesome,” says Ryan Petros, a senior on last year’s Ellsworth High School boys team. “The crowd, they’re just unbelievable.”
And speaking of the crowds, they are often just as much fun to watch as the games.
For more than 15 years, the Shead High School “cheerleaders”—five Eastport senior citizens—have sat together in the stands. Though two of the women have passed on, you can’t miss the three who still come out for the games. They’re always dressed in the school colors of orange and black, complete with tiger bedroom slippers.
“Shead doesn’t have any school cheerleaders,” says 78-year-old Jackie Davis. “So, we always hoop and holler for them at the games.”
Davis, as well as 80-year-old Elaine “Lanie” Hall and 86-year-old Inez Mills, is always smack in the front row, just left of center court, for both the boys and the girls games. “We like to razz the referees,” Davis says and laughs.
In addition to rooting on their favorite team, these women also make whoopie pies for the team bus rides, as well as help decorate the vehicles. And they post signs all along the travel route from Eastport to Bangor, including some large rocks in the woods of Cherryfield.
Davis recalls the time she and the other “cheerleaders” were spray-painting those rocks (with washable paint, she’s quick to point out) when suddenly a car pulled up. “We thought it was the cops,” Davis says, laughing at the memory. “Turns out it was a local television crew wanting to do a story on us.”
When asked what the teams think of their cheerleaders, Davis doesn’t miss a beat. “Oh, they think we’re a bunch of nuts. But we know they appreciate what we do.”
Like Davis, fans travel from near and far to watch the games. For many, it’s a family affair.
Jodi Sawyer had both a son and stepson playing in the 2010 tournament for Ellsworth. “It’s really nerve-wracking and I can’t eat the whole day,” she says.
Jason Mills brings his entire family from LaGrange. “We come down a couple of times and check out the action,” he says. “My son and daughter are big basketball fans.”
Cathy Cyr has made the trip from Benedicta since she graduated high school there...41 years ago. “I don’t have any favorite teams; I just enjoy watching the games. It’s also fun to run into people you know,” she says. “There’s a girl I graduated with that I see once a year at this tournament.”
But how does a team get to play in the tournament? It depends on their heal points. Throughout the year, teams earn what are called heal points. A man named Durwood Heal came up with the concept back in the late 1940s while he was the principal at Schenck High School in East Millinocket. Each school starts with a designated number of heal points at the beginning of the season. Who you play, and whether you win or lose, determines the amount of heal points at the end of the season and your ranking. The number of points are based on the size of the school—just like how each school is categorized into class A, B, C, or D. Bangor High and Hampden Academy are in class A while Schenck and Vinalhaven High Schools are in class D.
The system of who gets to play in the tournament has flip-flopped over the years. Originally, just the top eight teams were invited to play. In 1980, a preliminary round was added to include more teams—the top half of each of the four classes. That eventually grew to include two-thirds of the top teams. In 2001, every team was allowed to play in what was called an open tournament. Today the invitation stretches to the teams in the top half of each class.
“Some people don’t think it’s a good system, but the majority do,” Bill Fletcher says. “And, if you go back and check at the end of the tournaments, you’ll find that almost always, the winner of the tournament will come from the top four teams in the heal point system.”
Last year, both the Fort Fairfield boys and girls teams made the semifinals. The boys lost but the girls went on to win both the regional championship game as well as the state title. The northern Maine town of 1,558 people held a huge parade for the girls when they arrived back home that Sunday.
“We were the underdogs going into the championship game,” says Kelsie Wilson, a cocaptain for the 2010 girls team. “It felt pretty good to say ‘we’re the best.’”
“I’m sure there were a few people from Fort Fairfield who couldn’t get down for the game,” says Larry Gardner, coach of the girls team. “But they were either listening on the radio or watching it on television or on the Internet. Basketball is a big sport here, no matter what time of the year. It gets the most attention, gets people through the winter, it gets the biggest crowds—it’s the most noticed and the most publicized sport.”
Jeff Hart has coached the Camden Hills boys basketball team for 29 years. They’ve won five consecutive Class B titles, from 2004 to 2009. “We’ve had so much success here,” says Hart. “I don’t think people know how much we appreciate it. Our kids love the energy; it’s really a special place to play.”
Many of the coaches, present and past, once played in the tournament in high school. “I come on Friday and stay through the following Saturday,” says Terry Spurling of Houlton. It’s a trip he’s made since 1952. “I played for Ellsworth back in the old days when they had three classes, L, M, and S [large, medium, and small]. I coached Mars Hill, ACI, and then Houlton for 13 years. Now, I’m a spectator.”
Spurling’s wife also makes the trip down to Bangor each year. “But she’s usually shopping,” Spurling says.
“The tourney brings young shoppers and their families to Bangor not only for the game but the opportunity to go to the mall, restaurants, movies, and more,” says James Gerety, general manager of the Bangor Mall. “We sometimes refer to tourney time as our Little Christmas. We get shopping guests that we may not see on a regular basis who are excited about visiting our mall and shopping before and after their hometown teams battle it out on the court.”
The Bangor Mall will post the results of the games on a scoreboard in center court. Gerety says it often becomes a meeting point for tourney goers.
“Every year, it’s a welcome boost to the whole city of Bangor,” says John Marko, manager of Fireside Inn and Suites, directly across from the auditorium. “A lot of our guests have come down for years and years; this is one of the highlights of their year. It sometimes gets wild, but it’s a good-natured crowd. It’s good business.”
And all these people need a place to eat, too, which has been a welcome boost to downtown Bangor restaurants. “We get a lot more traffic during the tournament,” says John Dobbs, owner of Paddy Murphy’s Pub in downtown Bangor. “It’s always a lively and vibrant crowd.”
Planning and coordinating the tournament is a huge undertaking, and a moneymaker. The event is run by the Maine Principals’ Association (MPA), a private educational nonprofit corporation based out of Augusta. In 2010, the Bangor tournament took in $244,339 in sales during the week. An additional $16,986 was made during the State Class B finals the following week.
“Approximately half the revenue is used to pay the expenses of operating the tournament,” says Dick Durost, executive director of the MPA. The rest goes toward supporting the 32 other activities sponsored by the MPA, which have no income or not enough income to cover expenses, including the Maine Drama Festival and Competition, the Young Composers Festival, and a variety of speech and debate events.
The basketball tournament was originally held in the old Bangor auditorium, where the Paul Bunyan statue now stands. While a new auditorium was being built, the games switched to the University of Maine and what was then Husson College. In the last several years, Class A games have moved down to the Augusta auditorium.
“The basketball tournament has always been a big deal,” says George Hale, a longtime sports broadcaster. “It’s not unusual for people to say, ‘Mr. Jones, who owns the hardware store, you remember him, he was a star in the tournament back in ‘62.’”
Hale did television and then radio broadcasts for the tournament until a few years ago. “I remember doing it where teams were coming up from Jonesport and Beals. Every kid in the school was either a player or a cheerleader,” Hale says. “They didn’t have that many kids.”
Starting in the 1920s, the winners of the larger schools would compete in the New England Interscholastic Basketball Tournament. It was played throughout New England, including Portland. In 1945, the tournament came to the Boston Gardens, where it stayed. “I would say one of the most exciting times ever was when Stearns came in second to Morse High School in the 1963 state tournament,” Hale says. “They both went down to the Boston Garden to play, and Stearns won the New England’s [56–54].” The New England tournament ended that following year. Many believe the championships lost their luster when Connecticut, a dominant team in New England, stopped participating after a riot nearly broke out at the Garden during the title game between two rival Connecticut teams. There were attempts in the 1970s to bring the championship games back, but none have been successful.
In the beginning of the Maine Basketball Tournament, the boys teams were the only ones permitted to compete, but in the 1970s, girls were added to the roster. “Let’s face it,” says Hale, “the biggest single star of the tournament was Cindy Blodgett [now the women’s basketball coach at the University of Maine in Orono]. Girls basketball really grew during this period.”
“Way back when Cindy Blodgett played, we’d get about 5,000 seats filled,” says Bill Fletcher. The last few years have averaged around 2,500 to 3,000. Fletcher blames much of it on the recession. But numbers were back up for 2010. A little more than 16,000 people attended the first eight sessions. “We sold pretty close to 100 tournament passes for all 21 games,” Fletcher says. “That’s a lot.”
Hale believes broadcast coverage also helped boost the tournament’s popularity over the years. WABI-TV started televising the Class A East games in Bangor in 1953, about a month after signing on air. They went on to cover them for 50 years, through March of 2002. MPBN broadcasts games played in the smaller classes statewide and is currently in its 32rd year of tournament coverage. “It takes nearly 100 people to produce the games,” says Nick Woodward, executive producer and broadcast coordinator for MPBN’s coverage of the tournament. With digital television capabilities, MPBN is able to simultaneously cover two games at once. The network enlists the help of the New England School of Communications, as well as Time Warner Production teams, to cover Bangor, Augusta, and Portland.
“It’s a very family-oriented kind of event,” Bill Fletcher says. “I’ll see a couple come in with a little baby and the child will be fast asleep, but, by God, they’re going to be at the tournament. It’s really great.”
Note: Due to time constraints, this article was written and photographs taken during the 2010 basketball tournament.
