READFIELD — It wasn’t football as much as it was carnage. And Bill Getty couldn’t do anything to stop it.

The Maranacook football coach could only watch as Lisbon quarterback Tyler Halls handed the ball over and over to Noah Francis, a running back bigger than most of the players blocking for him. Black Bear defenders ran up, looking for the tackle. Instead, they were knocked down. Or dragged. Or trampled.

“(He’s) a monster. He’s 6-3, 280 (pounds) and he’s faster than almost any kid on our team,” said Getty, whose team lost that game, 36-0. “My middle linebacker’s bouncing off of him. We don’t have anybody that can even come close to matching that kind of size and speed.”

Getty insists there’s a difference between being outnumbered and outmanned. He knew which one he was seeing Sept. 9.

“That’s outmanned,” he said. “That can be discouraging for a team.”

With the number of players making up the Maranacook roster, however, Getty’s seen both. He’s seen lopsided scores, vacant sidelines and threadbare depth charts. He’s had to lead his Black Bears onto the gridiron knowing an injury or two could cripple his team, sometimes while going against teams with enough reserves standing on the sideline to form a second team.

The numbers are daunting — 21 players on a team that’s gone 0-4 this season — and the Black Bears are hardly alone. Low numbers ended varsity programs at Camden Hills, Telstar and Sacopee Valley, among others, as coaches and administrators feared sending younger, inexperienced players in to line up against seasoned juniors and seniors. This year, Boothbay withdrew from varsity competition in favor of a JV schedule, allowing its younger players to grow at a more forgiving pace.

“When you have those numbers, you flirt with that every year,” said Traip Academy coach Ron Ross, whose team battled low numbers for years, at one point fielding a roster of 14 players. “It’s always in the back of your mind. You don’t want to do it. … We’re still thinking about it. It never goes out. At small schools, you never know what the program’s going to look like. Kids change their minds all the time.”

It’s bad enough at Maranacook — which had to cancel its JV program this season — that the school is moving closer and closer to a Plan B. For the first time, the coaches and athletic director Al MacGregor will meet after the season to consider dropping from the varsity to the JV level — and while MacGregor didn’t speculate on the chances of making the switch, he said going that route wouldn’t be an extreme move.

“This will be the first time that we’ll be sitting down at the end of the year and saying ‘OK, what direction do we need to go in?’ ” he said. “I don’t think JV would be a bad idea if that’s the route we had to go to. … Sometimes it’s good for these kids to get out there, to compete and gain a little confidence and learn some of the fundamentals.”

It beats the alternative — games that are over midway through the second quarter and second halves that are a parade of freshmen and JV players.

“There’s really not a whole lot of value in those games,” Getty said. “It’s not fun to be on the winning side, really, and it’s no fun at all to be on the losing side.”

NO MARGIN FOR ERROR

Enrollment has dwindled at Maranacook — MacGregor estimated that he’s seen a drop of around 140 students — and it’s trickled down to the football roster. Add in that soccer is king at the school, and it gets even harder for the team to land the best athletes.

The horror stories regarding physical and mental harm from playing football don’t help, either.

“We tried really hard over the summer to draw more kids in and a lot of the time we got shut down,” senior guard and linebacker Logan Stanley said. “Not because the kids didn’t want to play but because their parents were concerned about concussions, getting injured, because football does have that bad reputation sometimes.”

The result is that practices become as much about self-preservation as improvement. Getty said that he and the coaches never instruct players to change how they play — going out of bounds instead of fighting for yardage, for example — but that there’s always a discussion to find one more way to sidestep an injury.

Sometimes that means reducing a player’s special teams reps. Other times it means limiting contact in practice. Or teaching safer means of tackling.

“We have various strategies we use to manage that, as well,” Getty said. “But the conflict between not having a lot of contact at practice and not practicing at game speed makes it tough.”

In the end, there’s only so much room to move things around. When they get on the field, players know that they’re staying there.

“No matter how much I want to come off to the side,” Stanley said, “it’s just not going to happen, most of the time.”

BEATING THE ODDS

The numbers disparity is evident almost every week — and yet, Getty said, the Black Bears often don’t mind. It feeds the us-against-the-world mentality, a powerful motivator in sports.

“I think the kids enjoy the underdog role that naturally creates,” he said.

“The only people that really matter are the 11 on the field,” senior outside linebacker and running back Drew Davis added. “It’s who’s got the best 11 and who plays best that game.”

With numbers outside of their control, the players and coaches focus on what they do have say over. They focus on conditioning and lifting, doing what they can to ensure that the players who have no choice but to start on both sides and play every down are strong enough to do it.

“It really puts pressure on the athletes themselves to be more conditioned throughout the season,” Stanley said. “We have to learn to accept that we have small numbers. And most of the players here surprise me so much in how we condition, how much we work, how much we put together as a team that half of us don’t even need subs.”

To the Black Bears’ credit, not every game has been the same story. Maranacook played Medomak — sporting a roster of 29 players — and lost a competitive game, 15-6. But the disadvantage often goes too far. Larger numbers equal a larger talent pool and more chances for top-notch student-athletes. And when they add up, you get Lisbon.

“They know that there’s a difference between being outmanned and outnumbered,” Getty said. “When we’re outnumbered, we don’t care about that. When we’re substantially outmanned, that’s a harder pill to swallow.”

HOPE SPRINGS

Small numbers aren’t necessarily a death knell for a team. Stearns famously reached the 2010 Class C final with 17 players on the team. And Maranacook’s JV team was whittled down to 10 players last year for a game against Winthrop — and won.

A short bench isn’t the problem. A lack of varsity-ready players is.

“If you have the right 17 kids, let’s rock. We’re going,” Getty said. “And if I had an extra one for each of one my seniors … we’d compete with anybody.”

It’s maintaining that enthusiasm that Traip’s Ross said is crucial going forward. Ross would know — his Rangers are proof that fortunes can turn, having gone from 14 players to 27 this year.

“That program’s going to survive because of what Getty’s doing,” said Ross, whose team beat Maranacook, 42-16. “They never gave up. That’s how you know they’re going to get through the low numbers. … That’s what you have to do. You have to keep the kids tight, you’ve got to keep the score close, you’ve got to keep them fighting.”

“We knew that we weren’t going to win a lot of games,” Getty said. “So we talked about the difference between what’s happening in our minds and what’s happening on the scoreboard.”

The numbers could soon match the drive. The Black Bears are hoping to add 11 freshman players next season, which would bolster depth and talent — perhaps enough to keep the team at the varsity level.

Until then — maybe even then — times will be tough. Drive and will can only go so far against physical mismatches that are, unfortunately, inevitable.

“I’ve got freshmen that are 120-pound players going up against a 200-pound senior,” Getty said. “They’re not the same beasts. They need those four years to develop.”

Drew Bonifant – 621-5638

dbonifant@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @dbonifantMTM

Copy the Story Link