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LISBON — Mark Stevens sits atop a heater inside the gym at Gartley Street School. He watches intently as the Lisbon/Oak Hill wrestling team runs laps aound a red wrestling mat.

Stevens, a Maine Amateur Wrestling Hall of Famer who coached the Greyhounds to seven state championships before retiring in 2014, is back in his element.

“There’s a lot of history for me on the mats here at Lisbon,” he said. “I’m happy to be back.”

Wrestling can find you in strange places. For Stevens, it found him at 5 a.m. on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea.

Watching the sun rise one morning, Stevens met Mike Arnold, a wrestling coach at Edmond North (Oklahoma) High School, one of the top programs in the country. In an hour of conversation, both found a lot of common ground: They’re both 61, have grown children and share a love for wrestling.

Stevens coached Lisbon for 17 years before stepping down right after his son, Zach, wrapped up a stellar career.

But Arnold has stayed in the sport, and his reasoning had a profound effect on Stevens.

“We spent the next 10 days running into each other everywhere, Barcelona and all these other places,” said Stevens, who is the Lisbon Parks and Recreation director. “We still stay in touch. … He told me he coaches for a different reason now: He said he does it for him. I asked him what he means by that. He goes, ‘Well, I don’t go to Fargo (North Dakota) or any of these national tournaments anymore. I let the assistants do that. But I need to be on the mats.’ I did some self-evaluation and went, ‘I need to be on the mats.'”

The timing couldn’t have been better: Lisbon posted an opening for a wrestling coach in May, and Stevens had just recovered from cancer. While Stevens declined to share details of his health battle, he admitted it pushed him back to his love of the sport. Stevens had kept his distance from the program in recent years, letting the team establish a new identity, but felt a calling to return to the sport.

“I’ve been through some big challenges the last couple of years, a couple issues with cancer, beat that twice,” Stevens said. “I just asked, ‘Where does God want me?’ Then Mike Arnold comes over and chats with me (on the cruise ship). I think that was part fate, I’m not denying that.”

In Stevens’ first tenure, he helped build Lisbon into a state powerhouse, guiding the Greyhounds to seven Class C championships (2001, ’02, ’03, ’06, ’08, ’09). But in recent years, the program — a co-op with Wales-based Oak Hill High School since 2017 — has experienced a decline in participation. Last season, the team had around 10 wrestlers.

This season, the team has nearly doubled in numbers (19), with several members who are young and new to the sport. Stevens retained former head coach Kyle LaRoche as an assistant while also adding Brian Wagner, a former standout for Belfast in the mid-1990s. The team has already made progress, recently picking up a 40-39 dual meet victory over 2025 Class B runner-up Dirigo, and a seventh-place finish at the Marty Ryan Invitational at Wells High School.

“For such an inexperienced group, we’ve really had a lot of progress, just in terms of learning skills and a bigger move set,” said sophomore Connor Jenney. “We’re growing pretty well, at a rate I haven’t seen in a long time. It gives me a lot of confidence. To see a group grow this much skill in a short season so far, it’s really inspiring to see everyone working so hard.”

“I’m having fun; it’s so much better than last year,” said junior Sidney McGehee, who is in his second season of wrestling. “When we first heard we were going to have Mark, I was excited. I said, ‘This is going to be different.’ I was excited, but nervous, too, because I didn’t know what to expect. … He knows what he’s doing, I’ve just got to listen to what he’s saying, and everything will come along with that. I’m very confident in his teaching.”

The formula for Stevens’ success isn’t a complicated one. He expects his team to be well-conditioned and ready to give maximum effort.

“A big part of (Stevens) teaching is, you have to work hard and you have to put in the effort to get to where you want to be,” Jenney said. “You need to put in the work to get to the place that he knows you can get to. He’s really good at looking at the team and seeing everyone’s potential and then going 1-on-1, teaching move sets to help that person.”

Stevens is also hopeful to build on the boom of girls wrestling in the state, with a goal of setting up a full girls wresting team, and using its connection with Oak Hill to have Zoe Buteau help coach the girls. Buteau went 104-52 in her career, wrestling mostly boys, and became the fourth girl in state history to win a regional title, in 2019.

“I definitely like the bond with the team, there’s no drama or anything,” said freshman Hayden Dubois, who is in her first season in the sport. Her father, Joshua Dubois, wrestled for Stevens. “We all basically understand what we’re all going through (in training). It doesn’t matter how good you do, whether you’re a girl or a boy, everyone supports each other.”