Rockland football growing> Midcoast schools try combining resources

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When Lynda Letteney saw a flier for the Mid Coast Youth Football program two years ago, she knew what was going to happen next.

“I saw it and I thought `Oh God, Jimmy would just love that but where’s it going,?’ ” she said while sitting in her Waldoboro home. “There was no seventh- or eighth-grade team here and they won’t let kids play cross-district.”

Then her sixth-grade son Jimmy got his hands on the flier at school and the grandson of longtime Bates College athletic director and football coach Bob Hatch came home and announced the obvious.

“He said, `I’m playing, I’m playing,’ ” Lynda Letteney said.

That notice set Lynda, chairman of the social studies department at Medomak Valley High School, and the Tiger Football Committee on a quest to change some rules and, possibly, small-town high school sports in Maine.

The committee has asked the Maine Principals’ Association to allow Rockland District High School to field a cooperative varsity football team – a team including athletes from nearby school districts which do not sponsor football.

In response, the MPA appointed an eight-member ad-hoc committee to examine the issue. That group may make a recommendation to the MPA’s executive committee as early as November.

“Our association has not dealt with any proposal,” said MPA executive director Dick Tyler. “They’re looking at cooperative teams in a more cooperative sense.”

The Maine School for Science and Mathematics in Limestone already sends its athletes to play for Limestone High School’s teams, Tyler said. But what Tiger Football, Letteney, and president Dennis Norton envision is the sharing of resources among the districts that goes beyond athletics.

“Camden has swimming and skiing teams and we don’t,” said Letteney, using an example. “We have gymnastics and Rockland doesn’t, so we see the potential here for some exchanges in different sports.”

What the committee is studying whether, and in what way, cooperative teams could form between school districts, as decided at the local level.

Those teams could be classified separately from an individual school’s team, and the combined enrollment of the schools involved with a cooperative team would not exceed the largest Class A school’s enrollment.

If a school district cut a sport, students would wait two years before being allowed to compete for a cooperative team.

“We never wanted this to be an out for a school system to drop a sport,” Letteney said. “We don’t want to say `Oh, you’ve got a good track program and we don’t have too many kids, we’ll just drop our track program and send our kids to you.’

“If you drop it, you’ve got to wait before you can send anyone, so you’ve got to think long and hard,” she said. “Instead of dropping a program, why not think `who doesn’t have this program, who can we ask who’s nearby?’ ”

Athletes could train at another school to take advantage of coaching and facilities, but still compete for their home school. Or two schools could join to form a new program, although it is unlikely schools with existing programs will be allowed to co-op them.

Tiger Football backers argue dynasties would be unlikely to form because of travel logistics, and see this as a way to save “home” programs, such as football, in a district facing budget cuts.

“One thing they did think about in allowing cooperative teams, was to allow schools without football to sponsor football,” Norris said. “If you don’t already have football, it’s very hard to start up a program.

“It needs to be those schools like Rockland, like Dexter, that have the programs in Class C that need to combine students contiguous to the area to play on their team because they have the coaches and the field,” he said.

They argue cooperative teams would bring in a bigger gate revenue, not only with their own fans but opposing teams’ fans, and that revenue could then be spread among the participating districts.

Cooperative teams are common in other states, including Connecticut, New York and Nebraska, for the same reasons of funding and participation.

Tiger Football was formed three years ago with the goal of promoting and preserving football in the midcoast area, and at top of its to-do list was boosting the PeeWee football funding efforts.

PeeWee football had three teams three years ago, and this fall, it includes six teams with about 150 youngsters entering grades 4-6 participating from the four area school districts which feed into Rockland, Medomak Valley, Georges Valley in Thomaston and Camden-Rockport high schools.

As those athletes entered middle school and wanted to continue playing, the SAD 5 (Rockland) school board approved, on a trial basis, the inclusion of athletes from outlying districts to play on the middle school team.

That gave the Rockland middle school team the muscle it had sorely lacked in previous years, as about 22 Camden-Rockport and Medomak Valley kids played on the 45-member middle school team.

To accomodate the extra players, Tiger Football raised enough funds to pay for new middle school uniforms, uniform repair, and an extra assistant coach.

Coached by Ed Mazurek, a former Rockland varsity coach and a 1960 New York Giants guard, the team’s 6-1 season boosted morale and the number of Tiger fans at each game.

“First of all, before that we were kind of limited with the number of kids, we’d get around 25 Rockland kids out,” Mazurek said. “We were just limited with the number of kids, particularly size-wise, but most of them were what we’d call backfield material.

“I know from talking with the kids from Medomak and Camden, they really enjoyed football and really there was no feeling of `I’m from Rockland and you’re from Camden,’ ” he said. “I thought it gave the kids a chance to know one another, and it gave kids the chance to play football at this age.”

In the new spirit of cooperation, Harold Ralph Cheverolet-Geo of Waldoboro loaned a 12-seat van to SAD 40 each day for free. Because SAD 5 was the host school, the district gave the van municipal plates, which cost an additional $150 to the fleet insurance.

Each SAD 40 football player then paid $15 to defray the insurance cost, and $2 a week for gas for the van which Lynda Letteney and another mother drove every day.

All players were covered under SAD 5’s liability insurance plan since it covered all SAD 5 teams, as long as they were deemed eligible under the district’s rules.

Early departure for away game days was handled when Medomak Valley arranged for the district’s bus picking up students at the Mid-Coast School of Technology to go to the district’s junior highs, and head for Rockland an hour ahead of schedule.

And now members of that team are high school freshmen playing on Rockland’s JV team, but they need a rule change to be allowed to play varsity football as sanctioned by the MPA.

“We had tremendous morale last year, the kids were all fired up, we had real good parental support, and I really enjoyed coaching,” Mazurek said. “The interest is there. I think, hopefully, they will be able to work with this, and that maybe this is the wave of the future if football is to survive in the smaller communities.”