You can trace a key part of what you see in Maine high school football today to bulletins handed out at Penney Memorial Church in Augusta.

After taking a bulletin at the start of the service, young B.L. Lippert would draw an offensive play on the back then hand it to his father. Bob Lippert, then Cony’s defensive coordinator, drew up a defense he might use against it — and back and forth they’d go.

“He’d give it back to me, and I’d draw a blocking scheme and a run play, and then he’d say, ‘Well, if you do that, I’m going to call this,’” recalled B.L. Lippert, now Cony’s head coach. “I don’t know what that means for my eternal soul, but I do know that’s kind of how (I learned offense), just kind of picking his brain from the defensive side of things.”

Thirty years later, Lippert is one of two coaches in the state — Leavitt coach Mike Hathaway is the other — who’ve re-defined high school football offenses in the 21st century. The two gurus of the spread will finally meet in the regular season on Saturday night, when Cony visits Turner to play Leavitt.

Hathaway, a 1992 Leavitt graduate, has coached the Hornets since 2002, and his teams have won five state championships (2009, 2013, 2019, 2022, 2023). Lippert, who graduated from Cony in 2000, has led the Rams since 2015 and was previously the offensive coordinator for the 2013 Cony team that won the Class B championship, ending an 81-year state title drought.

The two first got to know each other through 7-on-7 camps in 2009, but in February 2017, Hathaway came up with an idea that brought them closer. Maine, Hathaway said, needed something to help grow the passing game, which they agreed lagged behind other states.

That summer, with the help of Bonny Eagle head coach Kevin Cooper, they introduced the now-well-known Maine Elite Passing Camp.

“I just thought, ‘You know, there’s not enough attention to the pass game in Maine,’” Hathaway said. “There were a lot of guys in Maine that were good athletes that could use something more, but there was nothing like this. If you wanted that kind of camp, you would’ve had to go to some college’s prospect camp, which is not that instructive, or you have to go out of state.”

What began as a single-day event in Augusta that drew 65 players that first year has since grown beyond the coaches’ wildest dreams. This summer, players from 93 schools across New England participated in the camp, which was split into separate sessions, July 8-11 at Fitzpatrick Stadium in Portland and July 22-25 at Cony High School in Augusta.

Leavitt head football coach Mike Hathaway looks to the sidelines during an Aug. 30 scrimmage against Thornton Academy in Turner. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

At Maine Elite Passing Camp, as players and coaches from across the state will tell you, Lippert is a route-running wizard. Gardiner head coach Pat Munzing is constantly amazed at the different ways his rival counterpart can get receivers open. Landon Daigle, a senior receiver at Leavitt, credits Lippert with much of his development at the position.

“Anything we’ve learned at (Maine Elite), I’ve (brought that into my repertoire),” Daigle said. “He’s so involved. We all run routes with him all the time, and he’s really good at teaching us how to run routes and get open. There’s good chemistry with him and everyone. He’s such a smart guy, and he’s a great football coach. Everything he says, you can tell he knows what he’s doing and that he’s going to help you be successful.”

Hathaway, meanwhile, is a quarterback whisperer. He coached Noah Carpenter, the two-time Maine Gatorade Player of the Year who guided Leavitt to back-to-back unbeaten seasons and Class C state titles in 2022 and 2023. He’s also worked with Parker Morin, Cony’s current quarterback. Morin didn’t have much experience at the position prior to last year, but he did learn some from Hathaway as an eighth-grader in 2021 before bursting onto the scene as a sophomore last season.

“He’s taught me pretty much everything I know,” Morin said of Hathaway. “I think (the biggest thing he’s taught) me is footwork, just making sure I don’t throw off my back foot and get a good ball. … I learned all the mechanics and how to read a defense from him. I’ve got to give it to the guy; he’s taught me a lot.”

Fridays in the fall are when the true genius of Hathaway and Lippert are on display. The 2013 Cony team’s spread offense that Lippert built is one of the most iconic units in Maine high school football history. The Rams did the unheard of that season: They threw the ball 40-50 times a game. Meanwhile, Hathaway’s Hornets scored more than 1,000 points over just 22 games from 2022-23.

The two coaches have incorporated each other’s plays into their offenses, as have many other coaches in Maine. Hathaway has included of Lippert’s screen game into Leavitt’s playbook, calling the Cony head coach “the master of the screen.” Lippert, meanwhile, has incorporated a lot of Hathaway’s run plays into his scheme, while Munzing has used the Leavitt mastermind’s concepts to run the jet sweep from multiple sets.

Cony High School football coach B.L. Lippert talks to players during practice Tuesday in Augusta. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

On the other side of the ball? Well, scheming against both coaches is a nightmare. Munzing has coached numerous games against both coaches, with Gardiner having played in both Cony’s Class B North and Leavitt’s C South over the past decade. Just when he thinks he has seen something on film the Tigers can attack, Munzing said, Lippert and Hathaway throw a wrench into things.

“It’s almost like they’re looking into a magic eight-ball,” Munzing said. “You might see them run jet motion and run a toss one week, and then, they’re going to come back and run counter off of that same motion or same look the next week. … They always have that ‘if’ answered: ‘If this presents itself, we’re going to do this; if the defense does that, we’re going to go back to this.’ They’re so good at that.”

Skip Capone, head coach at Cheverus who previously coached Lewiston High from 1983-96 and was an assistant at Bates College for more than 20 years, said defensive players in recent years have had to become much more athletic to defend against the increasing number of spread offenses. Much of that, he said, is due to the innovations of Hathaway and Lippert, whom he compared to coaching legends Mike Landry of Biddeford and Pete Cooper of Lawrence in terms of their impact on the game.

Wells head coach Tim Roche has faced Hathaway’s Leavitt teams on several occasions. His Warriors beat the Hornets in the 2011 Class B title game before Leavitt got the best of his Wells teams four times during the latter’s most recent stint in Class C South from 2019-22.

Although Roche said the Warriors won’t deviate from the old-school Wing-T as long as he’s coaching, he knows just how influential Hathaway and Lippert have been in growing the spread offense across the state — and he has a theory.

“(Their offenses) have brought the game to another level,” Roche said. “I don’t know this factually, but I’ve surmised that the reason we’re playing more 6 o’clock Friday night games (as opposed to 7) is that the games are lasting way longer than they used to because the ball’s being thrown so much more. It’s changed immensely from back when I was first coaching.”

Leavitt football coach Mike Hathaway celebrates with his team after it beat Cape Elizabeth in the 2022 Class C South title game at Lewiston High School. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

As for Saturday night’s game, Hathaway knows the phenom coming to Turner is one he helped create. Cony’s Morin hadn’t truly played the quarterback prior to his sophomore season in 2023 but had learned a little bit of the position from Hathaway as an eighth-grader at Maine Elite in 2021. Returning to the camp the past two summers, he’s learned even more.

“I look back on it, and teaching him up was probably a bad idea — it’s coming back to bite me because now we have to play him,” Hathaway joked. “I remember I tried to get his baseball stuff out of his system because he’s such a good baseball player that it sneaks into his quarterback play, but I won’t talk to him this week about that. I’ll maybe let that stay in there.”

Playing one of his best friends, Hathaway said, feels a bit odd. He likened it to the days of playing another old friend, late Oak Hill coaching great Stacen Doucette. Although the two would constantly talk football strategies, Doucette wouldn’t reach out during the weeks his Raiders were set to face the Hornets out of fear that Hathaway would use those tips against him.

There’s certainly been less communication between Hathaway and Lippert this week as well, though Lippert said they’ve still been in touch “more than we probably should be.” Yet rather than worrying be might get burned by something he mentions in a conversation, he has a fear similar to Hathaway’s: that a player he’s mentored might dice up his defense Saturday night.

“That Mason Henderson is a real playmaker for them,” said Lippert, whom the Leavitt junior called a major influence on his growth through Maine Elite. “Some of the routes I’ve taught him, it’s the same way Hath has coached (Morin) up on some things. I might regret it Saturday if he catches a deep ball against us.”