DYER BROOK – During preseason practice for high school baseball pitchers and catchers this week, Dakota Sleeper heard the same lessons Southern Aroostook Community School players have absorbed for decades.

And as the promising pitcher and shortstop listened to Murray Putnam speak, Sleeper was fully aware of how such lessons already had enhanced his game.

“He’s a great motivator,” said Sleeper. “Last year I was a freshman, and he pretty much walked me through all the mechanics of pitching. He gained a couple of miles per hour on my fastball and taught me a curveball.

“He teaches old school, and I love it.”

Sleeper’s sentiments are sure to ring familiar to hundreds of earlier Southern Aroostook players, for in an era when coaching longevity is a threatened concept, the 61-year-old Putnam begins his 40th year as a varsity baseball coach still true to his game and his core beliefs.

“He started so long ago, he’s sort of his own institution,” said Jason Tarr, a school principal in Houlton who played for Putnam on two state championship teams during the mid-1980s. “He built the program and had a lot of success, and he’s certainly been a mentor to a lot of people, myself included.”

Such enduring relationships are founded in the fundamentals of the coach-player relationship that have enabled Putnam to build and maintain one of Eastern Maine’s most consistently competitive small-school baseball programs.

“The biggest thing I learned from Murray was discipline,” said Tim Prescott, who played for Putnam at Southern Aroostook during the mid-1970s and has been the varsity boys basketball coach at Presque Isle for more than two decades. “I always think he looked at discipline as a positive. I don’t think like he thought about what discipline does to kids, but what discipline does for kids.”

That discipline has helped the dean of the state’s schoolboy baseball coaching fraternity and his teams earn 10 Eastern Maine championships, five state titles and 423 career victories since he first stepped onto the diamond at Oakfield Community High School in 1968.

“He was strict, and he had high expectations,” recalled Tarr. “But we also knew he was going to be fair and that if we did what he expected of us we probably were going to be playing for championships.”

Honesty is the best policy

While the program’s most recent state title came in 1999, the Warriors have not faltered, overcoming the declining enrollment trend common in northern Maine to compile a 74-24 record over the last six seasons.

Chalk it up to a focus on the basics of baseball and life.

“The vast majority of youngsters reflect in a positive way on being dealt with flat-out honestly,” said Putnam, who also is his school’s assistant principal, teaches a history class, and for the last 35 years has served as Southern Aroostook’s athletic administrator.

“There’s a lot to be said for being flat-out honest,” said Putnam. “What I’m going to tell you, you might not like to hear, but it is the truth as I know it and the truth based on these criteria because I already know a [baseball] scenario and I know how the scenario will play out over and over again.”

That honesty has led to a fierce loyalty between Putnam and his players. Ask Putnam his greatest coaching success, and he’ll cite the successful educators and state troopers and bankers and railroad workers and ministers who have worn the Warriors’ purple and white.

“Most of them have possessed a very good and positive work ethic,” he said. “I think for the most part that through their efforts and contributions to the varsity baseball program here at Southern Aroostook that a huge part of the benefit for them has been that most have realized the rewards of hard work.”

And to a man, his players past and present have appreciated an honesty that has precluded Putnam playing favorites. Whether it be during a game or practice, or during team-building preseason trips south, he is not one to tell a player merely what he wants to hear but what he sees as the reality of a given situation.

“He’s passionate, he’s consistent and it didn’t matter who you were, what your last name was or which town you were from,” said Jon Porter, who played on state championship teams under Putnam in 1988 and 1989 and is now Southern Aroostook’s principal. “It was a matter of him being consistent. He expected you to show up on time, to play as hard as you could and do the little things so you didn’t beat yourself mentally. He expected physical errors and understood that mistakes happen, but he focused on not making those mental mistakes.”

From rural roots

Putnam grew up on a potato and dairy farm 10 miles south of Houlton with 10 brothers and sisters, many of whom shared a passion for athletics.

His mother was an elementary school teacher, several others in his family also became educators and so did Putnam after graduating from Ricker Classical Institute and Ricker College in Houlton.

“I really wasn’t sure what I might do most of the way through college,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing that just grew on me. I didn’t feel any sense of obligation to do it, but I did feel a sense of whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability.”

Putnam began teaching and coaching in 1968 in nearby Oakfield, a community where baseball long has been important.

“The Oakfield area, in particular in the post-World War II era, was renowned for summer ball and town team ball like what you’d see in the rest of rural Maine at the time,” he said. “A number of the folks I met when I first came here out of college had experienced that, and a number of those folks had children and in some cases nephews and in some cases even third-generation children who could identify with what baseball meant in a rural setting.”

Putnam instituted a Pony League program for younger players in the area, and also quickly found success at the high school level. By 1970, Oakfield ended a 16-year title drought by winning the Katahdin Valley League title.

Three years later, the landscape changed, as Oakfield, Island Falls, Smyrna, Merrill, Dyer Brook and Crystal merged into the Southern Aroostook Community School District as part of the state’s school consolidation efforts of the era. Southern Aroostook Community School opened in April 1976 to finally bring all those students together in the same building, and while the school district continued to grow, so did the baseball program.

The Warriors broke through to win back-to-back Eastern Maine championships in 1977 and 1978, and at the same time community members worked to provide the baseball program a permanent home by building a new diamond at the new school.

“We built it with local help. There was no godsend, no huge money drop from anywhere, but a whole lot of folks generously gave of their time,” Putnam said. “We managed to build a good facility, and I had the good fortune after the first year we used it when the board of trustees elected to name it. That was quite an honor.”

Welcome to the Murray W. Putnam Baseball Field.

Tradition of excellence

Many top-notch players have competed on Putnam Field throughout the last 30 years, as Southern Aroostook has gone on to win eight more Eastern Maine titles as well as state championships in 1984, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1999.

But don’t expect Putnam – a 2002 inductee into the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame – to pick a favorite.

“When someone asks me to name my best catcher or shortstop, I respond to that by saying they’re all my catchers or they’re all my shortstops, because I believe you don’t say things that could be divisive or alienate any youngster,” he said. “I don’t compare eras. I’ve had the good fortune to coach three generations, and they are all uniquely partly the victim and partly the product of the era they’ve lived in.”

But make no mistake about it, the postseason is a defining time of year.

“To me, it has long been, and I think the vast majority of youngsters I’ve had the good fortune to deal with would share this, special to play in the postseason,” Putnam said. “When you get into the postseason, that’s another entity and a whole lot of things can happen there because no matter what it says on paper, it isn’t played on paper, it’s played on the arena of play.”

Perhaps that was no more evident than in 1987, just one year after high school baseball converted from a league format to Heal points for organizing its playoffs and Southern Aroostook had joined a newly added Class D.

The state final was a rematch between Southern Aroostook and North Yarmouth Academy, which had edged the Warriors 5-3 in 1986.

“I had the nucleus of the same club from the year before, and so did they,” said Putnam. “I knew we wouldn’t rip the cover off the ball against [NYA pitcher Eric Fenton, who later played hockey at the University of Maine], so I was willing to be a risk taker to the extent that after one walk, we laid down two bunts.

“They were well placed, which isn’t guaranteed, but they misplayed both of them, and we had one solid hit. We scored three runs in that inning. That was all we got, but that was enough. We held them.”

That 3-2 win was a bit out of the ordinary for a program once nicknamed the Lumber Company, but it represented Putnam at his strategic best.

“If it’s obvious that the only way you’re going to generate offense is to try something different than you had before, I’ll do that,” he said. “Am I one who’ll get on the diamond and run helter-skelter? No. You just have to focus on the task at hand, and too many people don’t do that.”

The changing arena

As Putnam adapted to that particular baseball situation, he also has adjusted to many other changes throughout his career – like giving up throwing batting practice in 1999, a task he did ambidextrously.

He has also had to work with a smaller student population. When Southern Aroostook first opened, it had about 230 students in grades 9-12. Today, that number is about 130.

“There are negatives to that,” he said, “but that said, it’s probably superseded by the fact that if a youngster truly wants to put forth an effort and take part, there’s probably a uniform here for him. I think that’s one of the unique features of small school systems, certainly in rural Maine and I might suggest in rural America.”

There’s also the more complicated family structures of recent times that can place additional pressures on adolescents who might loom slightly larger in life in baseball uniforms but ultimately are still just kids.

“Every one of the youngsters who came through the door here today, and I submit in every other school system, they came to school from some dwelling that doesn’t by definition make it a home,” he said, “and in many cases that values system is shot to smithereens.”

Yet Putnam firmly believes the values coaches share with their players in practice and games can provide an avenue to success throughout the school day.

“I think we could show very objective evidence that during the time that youngsters are involved in co-curricular activities, their comportment, behavior in school and certainly what is reflected in an academic sense is higher,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s 100 percent, but I’ve seen numerous cases.”

Putnam expects approximately 20 student-athletes to turn out Monday for the first day of full-scale practices.

And while the focus of his initial pep talk will include virtually nothing about winning and losing, it likely will include everything about what enables the winning and losing to take care of itself.

“In the first place, never, not one time, have I ever verbally or otherwise harangued youngsters about ‘you need to win,’ meaning you’ve got to achieve some kind of regional and-or state championship and if you don’t you ought to go put a gun to your head or jump off a bridge. Never has that been part of my comportment,” he said.

“But I have, as I did with the [pitchers and catchers], said there are a number of things that we can do, and among our goals should be to be better off than you think you are right now, to be quicker, to be stronger and to think more of that seldom-used four-letter word called team.”

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“When someone asks me to name my best catcher or shortstop, I respond to that by saying they’re all my catchers or they’re all my shortstops, because I believe you don’t say things that could be divisive or alienate any youngster.”

SOUTHERN AROOSTOOK

COACH MURRAY PUTNAM

BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY KEVIN BENNETT

Southern Aroostook baseball coach Murray Putnam instructs players, including Cody Robinson (left), during a morning practice Tuesday in Dyer Brook. Putnam began teaching and coaching in 1968 in Oakfield.