It was the game that has defined the Lawrence High School football team for almost a decade. The Bulldogs didn’t know that at the time, though. At that point, at Fitzpatrick Stadium in Portland, Lawrence head coach John Hersom and his team were just trying to beat Gorham in the 2006 Class A state championship game.
Senior David Wallace was an undersized but tough linebacker. Wallace was the kind of the guy whose description always began with “pound for pound…” Wallace spoke up, and Hersom’s fears were lifted.
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“We had to call the team together and say ‘Look guys, can you do this?’ I can remember David Wallace making a comment that he would die for what we needed to do, and that was stop Gorham,” Hersom said.
Lawrence won the game, 14-13, becoming just one of two Eastern Maine teams to win the Class A state championship in the last 27 years.
When high school football teams are playing in November, everything is magnified. Suddenly, the intangibles, experience and poise, become very tangible, and can mean the difference between moving on and hoisting a gold ball, or turning in your equipment.
“You want to do all the things you’ve done all year, better, Winslow head coach Mike Siviski, who was coached the Black Raiders to four state titles and eight trips to the state championship game, said. “Playoff football, everything goes up a couple notches. Maybe more than a couple notches.”
Across central Maine, teams remaining in the playoffs can claim postseason experience as a strength. Cony and Oak Hill are defending state champions in Class B and Class D, respectively.
“I think (playoff experience is) important in preparation. The kids know that it’s an all business work week and that they need to pay attention to details,” Oak Hill head coach Stacen Doucette said. “Every little piece helps. When you’re in the playoffs you just want to gather from all your experiences and your highs and your lows and build off of it.”
Winslow played in the Class C state championship game each of the last two years. Waterville has been to back-to-back conference championship games. Maine Central Institute and Messalonskee are playing in their league’s semifinals for the second consecutive season.
In an odd twist of football fate, the most inexperienced team in the area, playoff-wise is Lawrence. The Bulldogs are back in the playoffs this season after missing out last year for the first time since 2004. Lawrence plays at Cony on Friday.
“We haven’t really spoken to the team about the experience factor. Every season’s different. Every team’s different. We kind of have built our team to this point where we feel we have great chemistry,” Hersom said. “We feel we have some strengths we want to continue to build on. We’re going to leave it up to them, I think, as to how they deal with the atmosphere of being in a playoff game against the defending champs.”
While Cony is the defending Class B state champion, the Rams were a senior-heavy team that won it all in 2013.
“It depends on what you have coming back for kids. For us, we have five returning starters in Reid (Shostak), (Tayler) Carrier, Elias Younes, Mitchell (Caron) and Elijah Tobey. …Outside of those guys, it’s a brand new experience for a lot of our kids,” Cony head coach Robby Vachon said.
Making it to the Pine Tree Conference championship game in 2012, where Cony lost to Lawrence, was a building block for the success of last season, Vachon said.
“I think it was huge. Coming off the Eastern A final loss to Lawrence we had a good-sized group of kids coming back on both sides of the ball,” Vachon said. “Then I think just that hunger to get back there, for one thing, and drawing back on some of the experience they had over the course of the season helped that group get us to where we finished last year.”
Playoff experience is important, Siviski said. This season’s Black Raiders have plenty of it.
“We only have seven in our senior class, but four or five of them of those kids have been to two state games, and a couple of them are two-way starters. I think it does make a difference,” Siviski said. “I think they realize if they have been there, it’s a whole new season. What you did in the regular season doesn’t really make that much difference.”
Since 2006, Lawrence is 4-0 in conference championship games. Each of those teams was different, Hersom said, but a common thread was letting the team learn how to believe in and feed off each other’s strengths. Hersom and his staff don’t have a blueprint of what to say and when to say it to get the team ready for a big game. Treat every game like a big game, Hersom said, and by the playoffs, the experience is there.
“I think we’re a kind of program that understands a lot about how to play in big games,” Hersom said. “What that formula is, I’m not really sure, but I think they have always seemed to figure it out on their own.”
Staff Writer Evan Crawley contributed to this story.
Travis Lazarczyk — 861-9242
Twitter: @TLazarczykMTM
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