HOULTON, Maine — Although Caroline Sanders has not been in high school for more than 25 years, she still loves the excitement of high school basketball tournament time.
Sanderson said Tuesday that she attended Houlton High School at a time when the population in the community was much bigger, so there were more students at the school, more sports teams and a bigger band.
With all that, she said, came “great fun whenever our teams made the tournaments, which they did nearly every year.”
Houlton’s Amelia Callnan dressed up Saturday night with a homemade shirt to celebrate Houlton senior Kolleen Bouchard’s historic 2,000th point in the Shires Class C championship game against Dexter. Houlton won 33-30. (Joseph Cyr)
Sanders said her parents would schedule their vacations around the basketball tournament so that the entire family could spend the week in Bangor.
“My father had this thing about sports,” she recalled. “He felt that any team could be jinxed unless he did certain things each year. So we always stayed in the same hotel in Bangor, and we had to sit in the same section of the Bangor Auditorium. Not necessarily the same seat, but the same section at the top of the old building.”
Heather Anthony, who attended Limestone Community School for several years in the early 1980’s while her father was stationed at the former Loring Air Force Base, also said that she has fond memories of preparing for the annual February tournament prior to school being dismissed for vacation. Anthony, now a California resident, said she can still remember being amazed by the sight of an entire region being so enthralled by high school basketball when she first came to Aroostook County as an elementary school student, especially since her family had previously only lived in the South, where football was the more popular sport.
“I remember back when I believe I was in elementary school there, the last day of school before break we would take a half day and have a pep-rally and the band would play and all the cheerleaders would get everyone psyched up,” she said.
One year, she continued, her parents allowed her to travel to Bangor with a few friends and their families to a game
“We were getting ready to leave the hotel a few hours early, and her father looked at me and was like, ‘Where are your school colors?’” she recalled, laughing. “I had no idea what he meant until he told me that they couldn’t take me to the game until I put on a school T-shirt or sweatshirt or something, because I would jinx the team. I didn’t have anything, so we ended up going to one of the stores down there and just buying a generic black T-shirt. One of my friends tried to draw a basketball on it, but it didn’t work.”
Both Sanders and Anthony said that while neither of them played sports in high school, they both appreciated the rituals of small town life and their connections to athletics.
“It especially helped me, someone who always felt like the new kid,” Anthony recalled. “Because everyone can get excited about athletics, no matter who they are.”
