Bangor High boys basketball coach Roger Reed had planned on a light run-through for his No. 1 Rams on Saturday, a few hours before they were set to defend last year’s Eastern Maine Class A championship, and then head to the Bangor Auditorium for their game against No. 2 Skowhegan.

Instead, the defending Eastern Maine and state champs were stretching and running drills at Bangor High’s Red Barry Gym as part of a regular practice at 5 p.m. Saturday.

Reed’s plan, as well as the schedule for three other Class A teams, changed drastically as the snow piled up late Friday night and early Saturday morning. For what may be the first time in eight years, Class A tournament games were postposed because of the weather.

“We would have come in and had a walk-through just to go through some stuff,” said Reed, who recalled a similar situation in 1993 involving Bangor. “Now of course, it’s sort of a down time. It puts you in a difficult situation because the kids were up to play.”

No. 1 Cony of Augusta and No. 2 Nokomis of Newport were to play in the girls’ regional final at 7:10 p.m., with the Bangor-Skowhegan boys game 15 minutes after the girls’ award ceremony.

The games will be made up Monday, with the girls game starting at 7:10 p.m. and the boys game 15 minutes after the girls’ award ceremony is over. Tickets will be available for purchase today at the Auditorium from 2-4 p.m.

The Big East Conference banquet was also postponed Saturday, and will be held March 17.

The Western Maine games were played as scheduled at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland Saturday night. Catherine McAuley of Portland won the girls title and Deering of Portland took the boys’ championship.

The Bangor area received more than a foot of snow starting Friday evening through Saturday afternoon.

Eastern Maine tournament director Bill Fletcher got the call from Bangor High principal and MPA basketball committee member Norris Nickerson late Saturday morning on the postponements.

Though the interstate and main roads were clear Saturday afternoon, Fletcher said there were several concerns.

. Three of the four schools sending basketball players and coaches, cheerleaders and bands to the Auditorium had at least a 45-mimute bus ride (Nokomis of Newport is the closest out-of-town school).

. Schools that draw students from surrounding towns, like Nokomis and Skowhegan, had to worry about getting those students safely to the schools.

. Fans might have had trouble getting to the Auditorium, which means a drop in attendance.

. Auditorium workers were having trouble clearing the parking lots of snow because of a middle school cheerleading tournament going on at the Auditorium Saturday morning.

Of course, the Rams had a simple cross-town trip from the high school to the Auditorium. But Reed understood the decision to postpone.

“In Bangor it’s one thing because we have a public works department that cleans up,” he said. “But if you’re in St. Albans or Hartland [near Newport and Skowhegan] and those places, a lot of those kids and their families are the ones they’re most concerned about. … I think if they’re erring, they’re erring on the side of safety and it probably would have hurt attendance at the Auditorium.”

Fletcher said the last time games were postponed because of the weather may have been the 1993 Class A state games between the Bangor and South Portland boys and Lawrence of Fairfield and Westbrook girls. Roger Reed was the Bangor coach at the time, and the Rams and Bulldogs went on to win.

Those games were postponed the day before their original date (March 13) because of an impending snowstorm and played the following Wednesday because the Auditorium was in use Monday and Tuesday.

Fletcher knew that wouldn’t be a problem this year. Last week he checked to make sure the Auditorium would be available Monday.

“I had no inkling we were going to get a storm, but it’s good to know those things,” he said. “That game [in 1993] we couldn’t play until Wednesday and that’s not good for the kids. We like to get the games over with so they can move on to other things.”

The Nokomis girls had to change their plans around twice Saturday morning.

First, when the Big East banquet was postponed, the Warriors scrapped their plan to head to Bangor early for the conference award ceremony, then have a practice at the Old Town High gym, then go to the Auditorium.

When Nokomis coach Earl Anderson got the call about the Big East postponement, he decided to leave for Bangor at 3 p.m., coach a shootaround at a Newport-area middle school, have a team dinner at Miller’s Restaurant in Bangor, and then head to the Auditorium.

Of course, when the game was postponed, Anderson had to come up with a new plan.

Trouble was, the Nokomis gym was already booked for an archery tournament. He made a few calls and found that the gym at Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield was open (Anderson is a history teacher and assistant athletic director at MCI), and the Warriors were to practice there at 5 p.m. Saturday.

With the school just about 45 minutes away from Bangor he doesn’t have to pull his girls out of school early. In fact, Anderson would rather play on a school day.

“Sometimes the kids play worse [on a vacation or Saturday],”

he said. “They sleep later, they lay around, they don’t get into their normal routine. They get into vacation mode and they play like they’re on vacation.”

Neither Reed nor Anderson planned to head down to Portland to watch the Western Maine games, but said assistants or scouts might go.