Houlton school boosting varsity sports offerings

Greater Houlton Christian Academy will be joining the already swollen ranks of full-fledged Maine basketball schools next season.

The six-year-old private school, which offers grades kindergarten through 12 and currently boasts an enrollment of 154 students, will add boys basketball to its varsity sports mix next year along with boys and girls cross country.

Why has it taken so long for a school with 154 students that already has varsity basketball and softball along with track and field to field a boys hoops team? Well, this year only 11 of those 154 are male students.

“We started out four or five years ago with an intramural type program and we had four or five guys who were interested in playing,” said GHCA headmaster Mark Jago.

Jago said school officials hoped to have boys basketball long before now, but they had to make sure there was a sufficient amount of interest and male players to field a team without having to forfeit games and/or skip a season should male enrollment or interest dip.

“Now we’re confident we’re good to go,” Jago said. “We have 11 boys now and we anticipate having about 18 next year. And of those 18, I think 13 or 14 came to the meeting to show they were interested in playing.

“We’ll only have two seniors on next year’s team and I don’t think either of them have played much organized basketball. Our greatest number of boys are concentrated in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, so we should be much stronger in two to three years.”

Ironically, the man who helped start up GHCA’s boys intramural hoops program, former Houlton boys varsity assistant Terry Cummings, will be the new head coach.

“Terry is going to teach fourth grade, which is a new position here, and Tom Zimmerman, who teaches sixth grade and is our elementary director, will coach the cross country team,” Jago said.

The additional sports brings to five the number of varsity programs GHCA offers, not including sports like tennis and wrestling which students can compete in as individuals.

“We may only have four to six kids come out for the cross country team, but we’re not worried about low initial numbers,” Jago said.

Given its status as the school’s lone fall varsity sport, cross-country should keep attracting more and more students through the years, according to Jago, who would also like to be able to field soccer teams.

“It can be brutal being a small school and not having the numbers you’d like to field a team,” he said. “We’ll probably be running a coed intramural [soccer] program this fall. We may even have a flag football team.”

Jago and athletic director Walt Riopel are also taking a long look at adding volleyball to the school’s rapidly expanding sports roster next winter.

“What’s tough for us we don’t have our own gym, so we have to play our games on the road all the time,” Jago explained. “We play mostly Aroostook teams, but we also have teams like North Haven and Lubec on our schedule.”

Soucy moving across the city line

Longtime Bangor High assistant principal Paul Soucy will be changing office locations next fall. The former Brewer High teacher and coach was officially confirmed as Hermon High’s new athletic director by a vote of the Hermon school board Monday night.

“He’s top shelf as far as we’re concerned and we think he’ll bring some stabilization to the job as well as the high school,” said interim athletic director and longtime golf coach Ned Collins. “He’s very well-respected. He has a great presence and will be a great, great asset to Hermon.”

After 17 years at Brewer, Soucy was Hermon’s assistant principal for a year before moving to Bangor, where he’s been the last six years.

“I had two stints at Bangor, two at Brewer, and now I’m on my second stop at Hermon, so it’s ironic how that’s worked,” said Soucy, who’s also director of the Big East conference. “I’m extremely excited about going over there as A.D. and vocational coordinator. It’s something I’ve had as a goal since 1989.”

Andrew Neff can be reached at 990-8205, 1-800-310-8600 or aneff@bangordailynews.net.