Gardiner soccer players work through a drill during an Aug. 16 practice at the Winthrop Area YMCA. Andy Molloy/Kennebec Journal
The old sports adage of “win and you’re in” no longer applies to high school soccer — and other sports — in Maine this fall. Boys soccer teams are gearing up for a season of open tournaments that will ultimately crown state champions.
Teams don’t have to win at all to qualify for the postseason. In fact, they don’t even have to win a game.
“I hate it,” said Gardiner boys soccer coach Nick Wallace. “The thing you’re going to fear is that upset. It used to be that if you have a good season, if you make the top four, you’re probably going to get a bye week. Now, you’re going to get an extra game against a team that — if we’re being honest — probably shouldn’t even be there. You should win those games, but there’s always the chance of injury or something going wrong.
“It’s a risk.”
Under the format used last spring for baseball, softball and lacrosse teams, all boys soccer teams in 2021 will automatically qualify for their respective class tournaments.
Certainly for Class B teams like Gardiner and Winslow, with experienced rosters and depth at all positions, the potential for a preliminary-round upset against a weaker team that likely wouldn’t have seen the postseason does present a risk.
For other programs, however, it presents an opportunity.
Mt. Abram boys soccer head coach Darren Allen looks on from the sidelines during an Aug. 21 play day at Lewiston High School. Adam Robinson/Sun Journal
Winthrop boys coach Jon Baehr, who took over the Rambler post prior to the 2018 season, had just 13 players on his roster when preseason training commenced. He’s taking the long view of this season, with the notion that anything can happen once you’re in the tournament.
“On the basketball side, we’d always taken pride in once you get in it’s a different beast,” said Baehr, who was a longtime assistance coach for the Winthrop boys basketball team before being named the new girls varsity hoop coach at the school, beginning this winter.
“We have no seniors, so it’s all about getting better,” Baehr added. “We know that we want to get to that point where we’re playing well when we get in that maybe we’ll be able to make some noise.”
That will be no easy task for Winthrop, because once again the Mountain Valley Conference will feature annual heavyweights Maranacook, Hall-Dale, Monmouth and Mt. Abram.
Class A North also has its teams built for this year and those trying to build for the future with young, small rosters. Messalonskee features no fewer than eight seniors, all vying for a spot in the starting lineup, while Mt. Blue suffered a fate similar to Winthrop. The Cougars’ senior-led team in 2020 saw the year stamped out by the COVID-19 pandemic and is back to relying on youth and relative inexperience. Skowhegan will spend this season trying to replace one of the best players in program history, Miles Lambke, who graduated.
As the boys lacrosse coach at the school, Messalonskee skipper Tom Sheridan has seen firsthand the challenges of playing in an open tournament.
His Eagles — the No. 1 seed in the Class B lacrosse playoffs — played a couple of lopsided early-round games before getting dumped by Marshwood in the state semifinals. Marshwood went on to appear in the program’s first-ever state title game.
Richmod boys soccer players work on a conditioning drills during an Aug. 20 practice in Richmond. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal
“I’m kind of soured on that from lacrosse. It was no fun being the No. 1 seed and beating up on a No. 17 seed in a playoff game. It just wasn’t right,” Sheridan said. “You kind of had to build (an open tournament) in, though. Some teams, you might have two or three games canceled because of Covid. Our conference is over so many different counties, and we ran into it some last year with our last game getting canceled because we weren’t allowed to travel there.”
Sheridan also sees the positives of everybody participating for the biggest prize, while also allowing a mulligan of sorts if things don’t go as planned.
“If you’re a young team that hasn’t been to playoffs in a long time, it’s a good experience. Or if you’re rebuilding, it gives the kids a chance,” Sheridan said.
“Soccer’s tough, though. You start the year with one group, and halfway through the season you’ve have kids injured and banged up, and you’re playing three games a week. You have a concussion issue and somebody else rolls an ankle here and there. It’s always changing. It’s good to have that built in, in a way. Some of the best years we’ve had as a program, we’ve had lulls where we went down with a bunch of kids and couldn’t recover.”
Whether it’s through injuries, scheduling changes or simple inexperience, this season presents an opportunity for everybody.
“We’ve been really young the last couple of years,” Wallace said. “We have a lot of juniors and seniors returning; guys who played as freshmen and sophomores. We’re deeper than we’ve ever been in the past — which is good, because our schedule is tough.”
Tough or not, boys soccer will be decided on the pitch and not by strength of schedule or a Heal points quirk that keeps a team out by mere percentages.
Everyone’s in.
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