Saturday’s Eastern Maine Class D football final at Alumni Field in Pittsfield will break tradition from recent LTC championship contests: The game will be played at night.
Since 2001, LTC championship games started at 1 p.m. Saturday, in great part because of the perception that the game time was etched in conference law.
And it was for many years, according to LTC secretary Mike Archer, athletic administrator at Orono High School. But the league’s bylaws were changed in 2003 to leave the decision up to the schools involved, with 1 p.m. Saturday remaining only as a default start time if the schools couldn’t reach agreement.
Soon after top-ranked Maine Central Institute of Pittsfield completed its 20-0 semifinal victory over Mattanawcook Academy of Lincoln last Friday night, the school’s athletic administrator, Jim Leonard, contacted an official from second-ranked Bucksport — which had just defeated John Bapst of Bangor, 41-13, in the other semifinal — and agreed to a 7 p.m. Saturday opening kickoff for the LTC final.
“Bucksport couldn’t do Friday night at 7 o’clock, so we did Saturday night at 7 o’clock,” Leonard said. “That’s when we play. We play our games at night. We have fans and parents who work, and it’s easier for them to come to a night game. And additionally there are some things going on here on campus this weekend that would create a parking issue in different spots and we anticipate a pretty large crowd, so it’s a lot easier for the campus to bear as well.”
Saturday’s game between MCI (9-0) and Bucksport (8-1) will mark the first LTC championship game played at night since the last time MCI won the conference crown in 2000, when the Huskies trekked to Millinocket to face a Stearns team coached by current MCI coach Tom Bertrand.
That game was played on a Friday night, Archer recalled, because of the scouting opportunity it provided, given that the Western Maine final involving a highly regarded Winthrop team that year was to be played Saturday.
That marked a deviation from typical practice to play the LTC final at 1 p.m. Saturday, a tradition Archer said stemmed from the fact that until the Maine Principals’ Association adopted its current “Championship Saturday” format with three state championship games at Fitzpatrick Stadium in Portland in 2002, virtually all state finals were played on Saturday afternoons at various central locations.
Having the LTC title game at the same time provided the winning team with a week of additional familiarity with the preparation and playing schedule for the Saturday afternoon state final.
Since the shift to Fitzpatrick Stadium, the annual state final involving an LTC team usually started either later in the afternoon or in early evening, and Archer said in 2003 LTC officials opted to remove its 1 p.m. Saturday game time for the conference title game from its bylaws.
“I’m glad they did that, to be honest with you,” Leonard said. “If you polled the kids, there’d be very few who would say they want to play day football and in reality this is for the kids. That’s what we’re here for, so it was an easy call for me from a number of standpoints.”
Leonard said that while MCI’s semifinal was moved to the artificial turf Seaverns Field at Colby College in Waterville because of poor conditions on the Huskies’ home terrain, Alumni Field should be in good shape for Saturday night’s championship contest.
“We would have destroyed it last week with all the water that was on it, but the weekend was good to us,” Leonard said, referring to windy and sunny conditions that helped dry the MCI field. “It was saturated to the point where it would have been a factor in the game, and at this point of the season we want the kids to decide the contest.
“Colby was so accommodating. We couldn’t thank them enough, so we decided to move it there last week and not destroy the field and not have the field become a factor. This week, that won’t be the case. The field won’t be a factor.”
