It would be easy to assume, then, that the gridiron is their second home, and home to their favorite sport. And that would be farther off the mark than a foul ball drifting toward some unlucky soul’s windshield in the parking lot behind the backstop at Bill Fairchild Field.
“Baseball has always been my No. 1 sport, definitely,” Therrien said. “I’ve always been from a baseball family. I started playing the earliest I could. Coming out here, perfect weather, baseball’s just a relaxer, I guess.”
“Dad started me young,” Martin said. “It was Dad’s thing to play baseball all the time, so he got me into it pretty good. I made a lot of friends, and that’s pretty much how I stuck with it.”
Bill Martin and Don Therrien were separated in age by roughly two years. Their sons rarely have been seen separately since kindergarten.
Their sensational athletic career at Oak Hill — Therrien and Martin also qualified for the basketball tournament with their senior squad — ends this spring with graduation and what the longtime teammates hope will be a lengthy playoff run.
Sports will continue, however. Well, their favorite sport, anyway. Therrien, a shortstop, plans to play at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. Martin, the Raiders’ top pitcher when he isn’t patrolling center field, will take his talent to Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, N.H.
“That is a luxury, and in our conference, I don’t think anybody has that,” Oak Hill coach Matt Bray said. “We’re very fortunate to have a couple guys who take baseball seriously year-round, which in Maine is very rare.”
Therrien batted .489 as a junior and led the team in triples, all while playing the entire season with a partially torn hamstring. Martin topped the Raiders in doubles, RBIs and runs scored. Both were first-team all-Mountain Valley Conference performers.
Bray plans to stack them back-to-back, third and fourth, in the Oak Hill lineup. It gives the Raiders the look of a club that should be one of the top clubs in the MVC after an up-and-down season that saw them miss the Class B South playoffs by a fraction of a Heal Point.
“It was a little bit of a disappointment, but we’re using that a little bit to build toward a better season this year,” Therrien said. “We’ve got a lot of the same guys from last year, so we’ve got the experience of playing with each other, and now this year I think we’re really going to put it into action.”
Oak Hill knocked off eventual Class C champion St. Dom’s on the road, but the Raiders also let late-game leads slip away against Dirigo, Winthrop and Hall-Dale.
“You can play six great innings and then one bad inning kills you,” Martin said.
Therrien quickly added that such unpredictability is what makes baseball “the best game around.”
Those words are to be expected from two athletes who were born into the program and had Raiders’ red, white and blue coursing through their veins from an early age. Their fathers each played for Fairchild, a member of the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame, in the early 1980s.
“I used to come up here every Sunday with my dad and Coach Fairchild, and he used to work with us,” Martin recalled.
Oak Hill won Class C championships under Fairchild’s watch in 1978 and 1981 and a Class B crown in 2003. The Raiders bagged a second Class B title with Chad Drouin at the helm in 2006.
The Raiders believe they have the talent to make a run in Bray’s fourth year. They reached the regional semifinals in 2014 before last season’s hiccup.
In addition to Therrien and Martin, leadoff hitter Connor Nilsson (.474 average, .583 on-base percentage as a junior) also has college sports in his future. He will play football at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H.
“What they have to do is find a way to infect the other players and get them to buy in the same way they bought in when they were freshmen, sophomores and juniors,” Bray said. “Senior year is tough. You’ve got prom and girlfriends and graduation and college and all that stuff to look forward to. It’s hard to get amped up the way you did sophomore year for the baseball team, but if you do that, the sophomores will follow.”
Therrien, the star quarterback and playmaking point guard, sounds eager to provide that leadership.
“We have our ups and downs in each sport. This one’s just starting over,” he said. “We haven’t won a state championship yet since I’ve been here, and I know that’s my goal and Jonah’s goal and Coach Bray’s goal.”
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