This job has never been confused with “working,” but the football teams from Leavitt and Oak Hill high schools made the past three months feel like a vacation.
On one hand, it is tempting to wake up the morning after the state championship tripleheader at Portland’s Fitzpatrick Stadium, consider the tingle in still-thawing fingers and decide that enough has been said and written about our local champions.
But then you run out of fingers on the other hand to count the reasons — work ethic, humility, respect for the game, healthy community support, toughness, resilience, flat-out excellence — that the Hornets and Raiders deserve every last ounce of adulation.
Our tri-county region almost always has one team playing on the final gridiron weekend each year. More often than not, we are gifted with the opportunity to celebrate a champion with a 90-point headline. Two fistfuls of gold aren’t unprecedented, either. It happened most recently in 2009.
Never in my memory, however, have we experienced twin titles that did the heart such good as Saturday’s sweep.
Winning is wonderful. All of us who follow the sport can name the half-dozen-or-so programs in Maine that do it habitually.
Doing it the right way is never a given, but it should be said without reservation, hesitation or qualification that the 2013 Leavitt and Oak Hill football teams pass that examination with flying colors.
The Hornets and Raiders were good from the moment alarm clocks rang too early on August 19. Anybody with two brain cells available to rub together knew they were good. Surely the teams and a few uniquely talented individual players knew it about themselves, but nobody ever got that impression by looking on the field.
We saw no dancing, gesticulating, chest-thumping or me-first histrionics whenever somebody in green-and-black or blue-and-red made an enormous play, which was often.
High school sports programs pay extreme lip service to the concept of “team.” Some emblazon cheesy slogans across the front of ill-fitting T-shirts. Others eschew the introduction of individual players, even though that practice jumped the shark the nanosecond the New England Patriots did it before winning a Super Bowl.
Getting your athletes to actually buy into that symbolism is the trick, a connection coaches rarely are able to make. Leavitt and Oak Hill embraced it to the n-th degree, in part because no transaction was necessary. If anything, the kids were the salesmen.
Perhaps it had something to do with the way the teams were built. Leavitt’s best players were a two-way tackle, a center/linebacker, a slot receiver/strong safety and a running back whose loudest contributions came on defense. Oak Hill’s stars were an H-back/defensive end who almost never touched the ball, a quarterback who didn’t play defense and two tailbacks in a timeshare. The Hornets and Raiders are likely to get royally screwed in the presentation of postseason individual awards, in other words.
Week after week, win after win, interview after interview, there wasn’t a hint of ego from Matt Powell, Levi Morin, Nate Coombs and Conor O’Malley in the Leavitt camp, or from Oak Hill counterparts Luke Washburn, Parker Asselin, Kyle Flaherty and Alex Mace.
You won’t go wrong if you assume they acquired those traits from their coaches. Leavitt’s Mike Hathaway and Oak Hill’s Stacen Doucette are just good dudes, as guys in our generation say with the intent of paying the highest compliment.
Hathaway is a creative, tireless, good-humored leader who strikes the absolute perfect balance of coach, teacher and friend that is required in modern youth sports. He models the concept of willingness to submit oneself to your peers by surrounding himself with a staff of assistants who either have been head coaches or should be.
Doucette should have been handed the keys to his own program long before Oak Hill welcomed him aboard in 2012. His passion and persistence were divinely tailored for the Raiders, who already had the athletes and an appreciation for the weight room in place. He, too, was born to do the thankless job. He, too, is the antithesis of a self-promoter. When he looks into the eyes of the 38th kid on the roster and tells him that he’s just as important as the all-star, that player is persuaded to believe it.
Perhaps even more significant than having the right coaches, though, Leavitt and Oak Hill have the right kids.
They come from good families with good parents. They generally understand that football is the fun part of their education, not the be-all, end-all.
The losses — and they happened over the course of two, three and four years, sometimes in soul-crushing fashion — left them embracing lessons and motivation, not excuses.
Those characteristics allowed Leavitt and Oak Hill to adjust in the middle of games when injury or imperfection would have placed doubt in lesser teams’ minds. That discipline, taught the correct way by the correct people, kept them from retaliating when defeated opponents tried to drag them into the mire.
Before, during and after a game, every game, the Hornets and Raiders exuded class.
They reminded fans and cynical sportswriters alike why we fell in love with this game and this little, rural corner of the world in the first place.
It is a joyride we shall never forget. Hail to the champions. And thank you.
Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.
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