The University of Maine was scheduled to play a nonconference baseball game at Boston College on Tuesday afternoon.
Instead, a few Black Bear players wound up playing catch in the parking lot at the southbound rest stop in Kennebunk.
UMaine canceled Tuesday’s scheduled 4 p.m. contest after the man driving the Cyr Bus Line motorcoach carrying the team experienced a medical issue and was forced to pull over in Kennebunk.
UMaine head coach Steve Trimper said the driver began to experience a bout of dizziness and said he needed to pull over north of Kennebunk. Once he was feeling better, after about 20 minutes, the bus continued to the rest stop, where he determined that he should not continue.
“Nothing serious happened,” Trimper said. “We were concerned about him, so he went in and sat down and ended up getting a ride back home.”
Trimper said the team waited at the rest stop for about 3½ hours until Cyr Bus Line could send a replacement driver down from Bangor. The Black Bears finally got back on the road at approximately 3:30 p.m. on their way to their final destination in New York.
In the meantime, efforts to squeeze in the game were abandoned, as the Boston College field does not have lights.
Instead, UMaine made its previously scheduled stop Tuesday night at a hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts. The Black Bears plan to practice Wednesday morning before continuing their trip to Vestal, New York.
UMaine closes out its America East regular-season schedule with a three-game series that begins with a noon doubleheader on Friday against Binghamton University.
On Feb. 26, 2013, members of the UMaine women’s basketball team were riding on a Cyr motorcoach that crashed in Georgetown, Massachusetts. Cyr employee Jeff Hamlin of Charleston was operating the bus that night when he reportedly experienced a medical emergency as the motorcoach traveled southbound on Interstate 95.
The bus veered across two southbound lanes, through the median and across the three northbound lanes of the highway — not colliding with any other vehicles — before crashing into a small stand of trees. Hamlin suffered burns from coolant that sprayed from the bus’s cooling system upon impact.
The most significant injury to the passengers was a broken hand suffered by then-freshman student-athlete Milica Mitrovic and two others who suffered concussions.