CALAIS – Bob McShane vividly remembers his first season as the girls basketball coach at Calais High School. He can still hear the echoes bouncing off the empty bleachers as he instructed his team during a painful 4-14 season.

“Bobby Campbell was playing for the boys team then and the gym would be sold out,” McShane said. “The next day, we’d play and there’d be nobody. Just absolute silence.

“There might be 15 or 20 people,” McShane added. “That hurt (the players). I remember them almost crying, wondering why nobody would come watch them play.”

That is no longer a problem. The gym still sells out, but now it is McShane’s girls team that is creating the basketball excitement in this Washington County town. Every year the town banks on its sea of light blue-clad fans trekking two hours down the Airline to the Bangor Auditorium and the Eastern Maine basketball tournament.

The Calais Blue Devils girls basketball team. Two straight state Class C championships with perfect 22-0 seasons. Fifty-four consecutive victories, including this year’s 10-0 record, going into Friday night’s home game with Searsport.

Girls basketball in Calais has come a long way from where it was when McShane was given the job only two weeks before the start of the 1986-87 season. Today, it epitomizes championship programs on a statewide basis, the perfect billboard for the cliche that success builds success.

Calais High School, neatly tucked away behind the Washington County Technical College, is but a 3-point bomb from the St. Croix River and its border with St. Stephen, New Brunswick.

Visitors to the school are greeted by trophy cases that highlight the athletic and academic exploits of its students. Two pieces of hardware stand out. Two gold basketballs, side by side, sparkling beneath the fluorescent lighting.

“I remember losing those games,” said McShane, standing in a hallway adjacent to the shcool’s pit-like gymnasium after this week’s victory over Schenck of East Millinocket. “Everybody would be laughing and singing on the bus. We were so used to losing that’s what everybody expected.”

Nine years later, the Blue Devils are used to winning. And winning. And winning. In fact, only one player on this year’s 15-member roster has ever lost a varsity game at Calais. That is Amy Murray, one of four seniors on this year’s team. As a freshman, she experienced defeat only four times.

The players try not to notice the winning streak hanging over their heads. Yet, it is such a source of pride among the people of Calais that, at times, it can seem overbearing.

“It’s great, but it’s kind of scary,” said sophomore guard Holli Tapley. “If we get down, we’ll be thinking, `We can’t lose this game’ because 54-1 doesn’t sound right.”

“It’s great to have it, but there is a lot of pressure,” added junior center Kelly Dow. “We just can’t think too much about it because one day it won’t be there.”

While the victories have seemed to pull in the fans, it is the players who help to make this love affair between the team and fans so personal.

These students are respected not only as players but as people.

Case in point: McShane related a story of a young Calais girl who wanted only one Christmas present – to see the Calais girls team play in person.

She got her wish, and earlier this week the team went to one of the girl’s local recreation league games to watch her play.

“We do stuff like that,” said McShane. “We try to get these kids to come to our open gym, just to come in and meet the girls. The kids get T-shirts in town and have the players sign them. It’s not as big as Cindy Blodgett, but for our town it is the equivalent.”

During the much-anticipated game with undefeated Schenck, a 73-59 Calais victory last Monday afternoon, the gym was flooded with Blue Devil hopefuls cheering on their team.

“They see us winning, bringing home the gold balls and they just feel like that want to be a part of it,” Tapley said. “They’re working hard now so that someday they can make the team.”

In fact, McShane reported that a group of fifth- and sixth-graders coming up through the Calais system is said to be the best group of young basketball players since the program’s turnaround.

“We’re loaded right down to the fifth and sixth grade,” McShane said proudly.

That is much the way the turnaround began during McShane’s second year.

A former Calais High School boys player, Class of ’73, McShane was hired by Calais athletic director Jim Frost two weeks before the ’86-87 season after coaching in Lubec. After trying to be everybody’s friend during that dreadful 4-14 first season, McShane changed his coaching style the next year.

“I was coming back to my hometown, we had started all sophomores, and none of the kids liked me,” McShane said. “I figured if I didn’t get fired, I didn’t care what the kids were going to think about me. I was going to start demanding what it took to win.”

One year later, McShane led Calais to a 14-4 mark and into the semifinals of the Class C tournament.

“I think we just had a good nucleus of players to build around,” McShane said. “They just decided to start putting in the time.”

With players like Jennifer Pinette, Crystal Hinton and Becky Moholland leading the way, players such as Andrea Gibson and Tracey Mulholland were able to work harder on their own games before coming into their own.

Gibson and Mulholland, two major cogs in Calais’ first state championship wheel, handed the torch to last year’s crop of Blue Devils. Today, Dow and Tapley carry that torch.

How far into the future that torch is carried remains to be seen. When that first loss comes, however, one thing seems certain. Calais High’s gymnasium should remain full because the girls basketball program is here to stay, as one of the best in the state, for a long time to come.

The McShane Years

The Calais High School girls basketball seasons during the Bob McShane era:

1986-87 4-14* 1987-88 15-5 1988-89 19-2 1989-90 16-4 1990-91 17-5** 1991-92 16-4 1992-93 22-0*** 1993-94 22-0*** 1994-95 11-0 Total (9+ years): 141-34

* – Missed tournament

** – Eastern Maine Class C champions

*** – State Class C champions