PARIS — Finishing with a .500 record and losing in the first round of the playoffs might not sound like cause for raucous celebration.
Considering that Oxford Hills had reached neither of those milestones since 2005, it is impossible to overstate how much ending those nine-year droughts meant to the Vikings, past, present and future.
“It’s hard to explain how important that was. I mean, everybody says winning is important, but when you’re losing, it perpetuates losing. To get out of that is so difficult,” Oxford Hills coach Mark Soehren said. “The kids finally got away from worrying about losing. You play not to fail, and they got out of that last year.”
Oxford Hills punctuated the breakthrough campaign with an 18-0 shutout at Bangor, the second time the Vikings left Cameron Stadium with a victory in Soehren’s first three seasons at the helm.
The Rams turned the favor in the Class A East (now North) quarterfinals seven days later. It did nothing to diminish the Vikings’ sense of accomplishment or satisfy their hunger.
“You can definitely feel there’s a turning point in practice,” senior multi-purpose back Jake Spinhirn said. “Last year it started to amp up a lot. This year the energy is still out there. A couple years ago nobody was lifting (weights). Now every kid on the team has been lifting all summer.”
Oxford Hills also beat Lewiston, Edward Little and Deering to make the playoffs after a parade of zero- and one-win seasons, but even the losses were a startling revelation of how much changed in a small window of time.
One year after getting pounded in its own homecoming game by Portland, 68-0, Oxford Hills went to Fitzpatrick Stadium on a damp Saturday night and gave the Bulldogs fits before bowing, 14-7.
“And driving the last two minutes to maybe score,” Soehren said. “It’s huge.”
The Vikings also had regional champion Windham on the ropes, ever so briefly.
“It’s not like we thought we should have beaten Windham, but there was a point, 13-7 and we were driving fourth-and-goal. Now, we didn’t get in the end zone, and they pick-sixed us and scored again, but we were there,” Soehren said. “This is one of the first times we can talk about those little things and kids understand their importance. You always talk about the little things, but when you’re losing, it’s tough. Now when you talk about inches, they get it.”
And they carry it with them through the fall, spring and summer.
Seniors noted heavy participation in offseason lifting sessions at strength and conditioning coach Jesse Wall’s nearby gym.
“I came here for my sophomore year from Texas. We went 1-8 that year, and I didn’t feel like anybody was putting that much effort in,” senior flanker Caleb Jewell said. “Really the summer before my junior year, I feel like people were getting into Wall’s and getting more motivated. They wanted to be better (individually) and a better football team.”
That sense of togetherness will prove vital to the Vikings, who will try to counter substantial graduation departures with what they hope is greater depth this season. The eligibility of Buckfield athletes as part of a cooperative team won’t hurt, going forward.
Two-way standouts Davis Turner, Malik Geiger and Brady LaFrance all played their final games for Oxford Hills in those back-to-back trips to Bangor. Turner, the Class A North defensive player of the year, is now on scholarship at the University of Maine.
“We were a committee before and we’ll be a committee again,” Soehren said. “We lost some genuinely good football players. You can’t replace a Davis. I was watching film, preparing, and I’m like, Davis was even better than I thought.”
Smith saw time at quarterback as a junior. He leads a senior-dominated offense that features Spinhirn and Kyle Dexter out of the backfield, Cordell Stewart and Jewell as pass-catching threats, and Gunnar Docos at tackle.
Spinhirn saw the most significant time prior to this season.
“I think overall we’re stronger than we were last year,” Spinhirn said. “Last year it was a couple of select players that were doing a lot of the work. This year I think it’s the whole team that’s doing it.”
“This year I think our offense will be a lot better because we have a lot of speed,” Jewell added. “We’ve been working really hard. I think our team will pretty good if we get technique down. We have a lot of effort in our practices. We’ve just got to put that into our games, and I think we’ll be fine.”
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