Thornton driven by ambition to coach

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Chris Thornton’s driving passion in life is to be a varsity basketball coach.

At 21, the first-year coach of the 2-3 Ashland High School boys team is believed to be the youngest varsity basketball coach in the state.

His passion also sends him on a 212-mile odyssey to each practice and game. Every day.

“Driving is getting old,” the Lincoln native said, smiling on a recent, and rare, afternoon off. “It was old after the first week.”

Home and work are in Lincoln. Johnston Dandy Co., which makes the watermark-making, wire-gauze cylinders for paper companies, employs Thornton in its shop and sends he and others on road trips to implement the rolls.

That’s when he’s not coaching basketball in Ashland.

“A lot of times I’m working 48 hours [a week] and up because I work Saturday and I take the overtime when I can get it,” Thornton said of his pre-basketball season work schedule. “But I haven’t had a 40-hour week since basketball started.”

After a season as the Ashland junior varsity boys basketball coach, while a UMaine-Presque Isle criminal justice student, Thornton was hired for the varsity job when former head coach Gerry Adams took the Central Aroostook coaching job this fall.

“I know they were skeptical in Ashland, one because of my travel,” Thornton said. “Wouldn’t you be? `Is this guy going to call in sick every other day because he’s tired of driving?’

“Or, `he’s 21 years old, is he going to be able to handle a senior who’s 18? Is [the senior] going to respect a 21 year-old coach?,’ ” Thornton said, voicing others’ misgivings.

But those who had witnessed Thornton’s first outing as a JV coach weren’t worried.

“His big dream is to coach, it always has been,” Ashland athletic director Ron Grover said, himself an Ashland varsity coach at age 25. “He makes the trips on weekends and stays with friends. Sometimes his father or his fiancee comes with him, or sometimes he comes by himself.

“But he’s only missed one practice due to weather,” Grover said. “He’s pretty phenomenal.”

Plenty of moose

The daily challenge of running a varsity program aside, Thornton still faces the adventure of making the trip on wintry, isolated roads.

“Route 11 is a killer because of all the animals,” Thornton said. “Just as a guesstimate, I’ve probably seen close to 70 moose since Nov. 20, the first day of tryouts, `til [Monday] night, when I saw four on the way home.

“There hasn’t been one trip when I haven’t seen a moose.”

With days starting at 6:30 a.m. and ending, on an away game day, at about 1 a.m., Thornton’s car is filled with emergency survival gear, including that vital necessity, junk food.

Emergency blankets, a shovel, extra mittens, socks and a coat fight for space in a car filled with empty Gatorade bottles, Doritos bags and Ring Ding wrappers.

“I clean it out once a week because that week I’m just building up more junk,” he said. “If I didn’t clean it up, man … I need a pickup truck.”

The cellular phone installed in his rapidly aging 1992 Cheverolet Cavalier Z24 this summer also serves as another survival tool, literally and figuratively, as Thornton uses it to let people know he’s “not out in the puckerbrush somewhere.”

“Keeping Unicel in business is what I’m doing,” Thornton joked of the nearly two-hour, one-way drive, during which he checks in with other basketball coaches and superintendent/principal Terry Despres. “I`m building their towers right now.”

At a conservative estimate of 13,780 miles driven over the course of a 13-week regular and post-season, Thornton’s nearly problem-free car won’t be seeing a second coaching season.

“About a week ago, it cost me $140 to get my light switch fixed,” he said. “I was going down Route 11, and you know how in some cars if you just hold the light switch in, both your low and high beam will come on, well, I burnt my light switch out.

“Actually, I didn’t burn it out, but my headlights wouldn’t quit,” Thornton explained. “I had a practice and I had to leave my car running for two hours because I didn’t want my battery to run down.

“When I came home, I had to unplug the battery terminal to make my headlights go off,” he said, laughing. “It’s midnight and I’m trying to find the battery terminal to turn off my headlights.”

And why would a 21 year-old guy with a fiancee want to spend hours driving back and forth to practice, coaching kids he barely knew at this point a year ago?

“I don’t know what the average age is, but you’ve got some 30 year-old coaches and then you’ve got [Jonesport-Beals boys coach] Ordie Alley, who is a legend in his own time,” Thornton explained.

“For me to jump in at 21, maybe serve a couple of years in Ashland, and then depending on my success up there, maybe somebody will say, `oh wow, maybe we’re not skeptical because of his age, maybe he does know the game and maybe he can coach.’

“That’s what I’d like to be seen as,” he said.

Few will question his drive. Hopefully, his next vehicle will have the same determination.