AUGUSTA — Johnny Christie has spent the better part of his life playing basketball.

“I started when I was 2 years old,” said Christie, now a senior at Cony High School. “My dad got me a basketball hoop and I started shooting and stuff, that’s how I am where I am now.”

Friday afternoon Christie — who also runs cross country in the fall, track in the spring and is the manager for the varsity girls basketball team — got an opportunity to showcase his skills and make a little bit of history in the process, as he took part in the first-ever unified basketball game sanctioned by the Maine Principals’ Association.

The smooth-shooting lefty knocked down a pair of 3-pointers and finished with a game-high 24 points as the Rams pulled away for a 54-25 victory over Oceanside. Aaron Brann added 16 points for Cony, Aaron Gray added 12 and Matty Baker chipped in with four.

The Rams got off to a bit of a slow start and fell behind 4-0 early, but responded in fine fashion with six-straight points from Christie and a 3-pointer from Brann to surge ahead. Cony never trailed from that point forward.

“A lot of our athletes can really play the game and I think you saw that tonight,” Cony athletic director Paul Vachon, who ended a seven-year hiatus from the sidelines to coach the Rams this season, said. “…It’s a great thing that Special Olympics has put together and the MPA came on board. I think it’s going to be something that goes on for a long time.”

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Unified basketball — which partners special education students (referred to as athletes) and regular education students (partners) on the same court — is similar to the sport most are familiar with, there are just a few differences.

There can be no more than two partners on the court at one time and they are not allowed to score more than 25 percent of their team’s total points. Teams are not allowed to press and the standard rules are for the most part the same, although their enforcement tends to be much less strict.

It being the state’s first MPA-sanctioned game it was a little bit of trial run for everyone though, including the game’s official, Don Sproul.

“This is my first ever unified game,” Sproul said. “I was just worried that I was going to come out here and screw it up for the kids. I just wanted them to have fun, so I realized it would be a situation that wasn’t going to be officiated like a normal basketball game.

“…(I’m) a Cony alumnus and citizen of Augusta, and I’m just so proud that Cony offers this now. I think it’s great that the other 17 communities are doing the same. That’s a wonderful program.”

To get ready for Friday’s game Cony — one of 18 schools participating in unified basketball this winter — held a scrimmage during school in front of the student body last Friday, and according to those involved it could not have gone better.

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“Everyone absolutely loved it. They thought it was going to be great,” Arika Brochu, a star field hockey and softball player who is a partner on the unified team, said. “The scrimmage actually helped bring in some more peer pals to help us out. We had a student crowd at the game and they were going wild when people were hitting threes and even stealing the ball away from us. It was a great environment.”

The genesis of the team at Cony takes its roots far before this past week though. According to Vachon, Christie and Gray played a big part in helping make Friday’s game a reality.

“Johnny and Aaron Gray were the ones that really started recruiting,” Vachon said. “Basically they said, ‘hey we’ve got to get a team together,’ and I said, ‘we can get a team together but you’ve got to go get them. If they want to play that’s fine.’

“They went out and got their buddies and friends.”

More than anything else, Friday’s game was a shining example of the beautiful potential of unified basketball in the state of Maine.

Early in the fourth quarter Oceanside’s Tyler Ward — by far the shortest player on the court — got a pass a few feet from the basket and launched a shot toward the net. It was off the mark, but a teammate managed to haul in the rebound and get the ball back to him in almost the same spot.

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This time the shot was true, banking it in off the glass. He then turned to run back on defense, arms raised and index fingers pointed in the air with an unmistakable smile of pure joy draped across his face.

“I think you saw me jump higher than any of them. That was really, really neat,” Vachon said. “You saw a big reaction and that alone gets you fired up. That’s why you’re here.

“It was just awesome.”

The score at the time was 44-21 Cony, yet not one person in the gym was happier than Tyler Ward.

Evan Crawley — 621-5640

ecrawley@mainetoday.com

Twitter: @Evan_Crawley


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