Amy Wadleigh is back playing for the Bangor High School girls basketball team.

Wadleigh, who has been dealing with a right shoulder strain since this fall, made her first appearance for the Rams in Tuesday’s 47-46 loss to Nokomis of Newport.

The junior forward said there was no actual diagnosis for her injury, but it started to bother her in mid-September.

Now that her shoulder has improved, Wadleigh is working her way back.

“It’s good to be back,” she said after scoring two points in Tuesday’s game. “[Coach Tom Tennett] wanted me to get back in it because I don’t have my wind since I was out.”

Wadleigh got a bit more playing time than anticipated because of other players’ foul trouble and for the simple reason she looked good while she was in the game, Tennett said.

“She played very well,” he added. “I’m very pleased. I asked her how she felt and she said she was fine.”

The 2-2 Rams are waiting for the return of Caitlin Smith, who suffered a sprained ankle in the Dec. 8 season opener against Skowhegan.

“I think after Christmas we’ll really start to come together,” Tennett said.

Transition suits Lincoln

Noelle Lincoln is enjoying her senior year at Nokomis after three years at Bangor.

Lincoln, a Dixmont resident who played soccer for the Warriors this fall and is a starter for Nokomis basketball coach Earl Anderson this winter, transferred to Nokomis in order to take advantage of a program there in which the seniors can take freshman-level classes at the University of Maine.

“It’s an agreement that the school has with the university because [Nokomis] doesn’t have a lot of AP classes, but if I apply and get accepted I can take classes [at UMaine],” said Lincoln, a guard who returned to Bangor Tuesday for a Rams-Warriors game in which she scored seven points in a 47-46 Nokomis win.

“I thought it was a pretty good opportunity,” she added. “… I love it [at Nokomis].”

Lincoln won’t actually be on campus in Orono next year, however, because she plans to transfer to Husson College in Bangor to study physical therapy.

Her transition to Nokomis was made easier, Lincoln said, by virtue of her friendship with teammates such as Tatum Welch, Teresa Cooper and Kelley Paradis, whom she knew from growing up in Dixmont.

Lincoln said she’s still friends with a lot of her former Bangor teammates and hugged many of them in the handshake line after Tuesday’s game.

“It was kind of weird but it wasn’t a big deal,” she said of returning to Bangor.

Greenville athletics growing

With 20 girls out for basketball this year, Greenville High has started a girls junior varsity team for the first time in at least seven years.

It’s a huge jump in numbers for the Class D program, which also has a 15-member cheerleading squad, the largest in several years.

Greenville varsity coach Woodie Bartley said part of the reason for the jump is a huge number – huge relative to the small 99-student enrollment – of freshman girls. Twenty-one of the 26 students in the ninth-grade class are girls.

Bartley said another factor is the athletic policy, which is being reworked by the administration and encourages ways to get all interested students involved in athletics.

“We’ll take all comers and find something for you to do,” said Bartley, who is in his third year as the varsity head coach and has also served as an assistant and middle school coach. “If I cut kids now, I might discourage too many kids and they won’t come out next year.”

The only sticking point from Bartley’s perspective is the lack of a JV coach. Bartley coaches the JV games and has organized his practice time into three 30-minute blocks. The first period is for the junior varsity players only. In the second section, the varsity and JV do endurance and running work together. The varsity team gets the final block of time.

The Greenville JVs logged a win in their first game Saturday, a 48-41 victory over Piscataquis.

The Lakers cheerleading team has grown, too, from four cheerleaders two years ago to 15 this year. The basketball teams took cheerleaders on the road last weekend for the first time in several years, Bartley said.