High school football in Presque Isle?
Time will tell
PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Aroostook County has a rich, albeit brief, football history.
According to local sports historian Jim Carter, schools including Fort Kent, Houlton, Patten, Ricker of Houlton and St. Mary’s of Van Buren once roamed the gridiron, as did Presque Isle, which in 1924 fielded a 40-player team for coach Louis Horsman.
The Wildcats subsequently went on to win the 1931 Aroostook County championship under coach Bill Hanscom, but by 1937 the program had neither enough players nor a quality home field, and the program folded.
The sport eventually faded away throughout the County, ultimately to be replaced by the rest of the world’s definition of football — soccer.
Football gained a second life beginning in 2003 with the creation of the Aroostook Football League, an eight-player brand of the sport that included teams from Houlton, Caribou-Presque Isle and the St. John Valley.
Those club teams found kindred spirits in other parts of the state and the league expanded, with the strength of the Houlton program leading to that squad evolving into a formal high school varsity team in 2014 and qualifying for the Class D North playoffs this fall.
Houlton’s ascension to varsity status has helped fuel talk of Presque Isle High School perhaps moving toward a varsity program of its own some day.
And while that day may not come in the immediate future, the commitment to a flag football program for elementary school-level players in SAD 1 that likely will commence in 2016 offers a first step in a possible pathway to varsity status.
“It’s baby steps right now,” said Presque Isle High School athletic administrator Mark White. “What we’re telling everybody is that this is the first step in a major grassroots, ground-level endeavor. SAD 1’s first foray into this is going to be flag football at the elementary level, and our hopes are that we will get interest in football.”
White also suggested the possibility of organizing a public informational forum in May in an effort to gauge the degree of interest in developing a high school-affiliated football program for the Star City and to address any concerns about the potential impact of football on the community’s soccer teams.
“It would be to begin to find out if we’re a football community,” he said. “I’m not convinced we are, but I certainly want to hear from the public.
“We really want to give the public as much information so they’re armed to make a good choice if it comes to that.”
The pathway now being explored would involve collaboration with the Aroostook Huskies, a local program borne from the Aroostook Football League. This fall the Huskies competed in the Maine Independent Football League along with the Valley Mustangs of Madawaska, the Central Maine Eagles of South China and the Damariscotta Eagles.
The Aroostook Huskies field both high school-age and middle school-age teams for players in the Caribou-Presque Isle region. This fall the Huskies’ high school-age roster listed 20 players, six from Presque Isle.
“The short-term goal for flag football is to get enough interest to up the numbers in the Huskies’ middle-school team and the Huskies’ high school team,” said White. “Once we feel we can field a team of Presque Isle kids on the varsity level, then we’ll go through the proper channels that SAD 1 has to start to look at adding a [high school] team.
“In terms of fielding a varsity team, I would say we’re years and years from that.”
It’s expected that the Aroostook Huskies would be involved with the elementary school flag football program.
“I feel a great spirit of cooperation about this,” said Stu Wyckoff, the Huskies’ high school coach and a longtime advocate of football in the County. “Mark has talked about making facilities available to us and really helping us so I think it’s on us to have a program that youngsters will want to join.
“The big challenge now is getting the flag program going and showing them there are little kids out there who want to play football. They’re looking at wanting to see a big involvement in the community at that level before they’re prepared to go forward.”
Wyckoff acknowledges the local sentiment for any Presque Isle high school-age football team to be a Maine Principals’ Association-sanctioned program run through the school.
“Pretty consistently throughout the whole history of this, it seems to matter to the kids and their parents of this community that it be a school program,” he said. “That didn’t seem to be the case down in Houlton and doesn’t seem to be the case up in Madawaska, but here in the Presque Isle-Caribou area not being a school program seems to matter a whole lot.”
Wyckoff envisions a collaborative developmental effort that would benefit both the Huskies and a potential Presque Isle High School team.
“What I hope I’m hearing,” he said, “is that SAD 1 will have an MPA-sanctioned football team, the Aroostook Huskies will have a club football team that includes everything we’re doing right now with the exception of SAD 1, and the two programs will share middle-school and flag football programs.”
For that to become reality, continued patience likely will be required.
“Hockey in Presque Isle started in 1978 and it wasn’t until 1991 that we had our first varsity hockey game,” said White. “It took many manifestations in which it went through the rec program and then it turned into Aroostook Youth Hockey and now we’ve got a pretty solid varsity program here.
“But that was 13 or 14 years in the making.”
