Some of Maine high school basketball’s best players this year are also some of the youngest.
That has been true throughout the season, but it’s become especially clear during the postseason tournament.
Across each of the regional tournament sites in Bangor, Augusta and Portland, freshmen boys and girls have been powering their teams deep into the playoffs.
The list of dominant freshmen is a particularly long one this year.
Quinn Pelletier of Madawaska is back leading the Owls boys in Bangor after winning the first ever All-Tournament Team MVP as an eighth grader a year ago.
Carter Brathwaite from Cony High School in Augusta had a stellar freshman year for the No. 1 Rams and scored a whopping 32 points in their Class B North regional final loss to rival Gardiner on Friday night.
Gardiner girls freshman Alexa Quintana dominated the paint in her Tigers team’s run to the Class B North final game on Friday night. The towering center had 16 points in a loss to Lawrence of Fairfield, capping off a phenomenal first tournament for her and the young Tigers.
Fellow freshman Olivia Breen has similarly been a force down low for her Oceanside squad in Class B South, as they continue their push for a state title after Friday’s regional championship win over Gray-New Gloucester. Breen was second only to Lawrence star Maddie Provost in conference scoring during the regular season, averaging nearly 26 points to go with more than 10 rebounds per game.
Cheverus freshman Khaelon Watkins has similarly helped his Stags team in the Class A South region as they take on Portland in Saturday night’s regional final.
And Machias freshman Aubrey Wood provided one of the grittiest performances of the North regional tournament so far when she scored 18 points despite an ankle injury to help the Bulldog girls advance to Saturday’s Class D North final.
If it seems like there is a particularly big wave of freshman stars this year, some prominent Maine basketball figures would agree.
Paul Butler, who played at Bangor High School and Colby College and was inducted in the Maine Basketball Hall of Fame last year, said the volume of talented freshmen competing at the varsity level is nothing like his time in high school.
“It was actually quite rare in my time that even a sophomore played significant time,” said Butler.
Now the principal at Bangor High School, Butler sees the explosion of freshman talent as a good thing for the sport.
“Kids are more athletic than they were,” Butler said, noting how high school athletes are sometimes specializing more in one particular sport. “But if you look at it just strictly as basketball, kids appear readier and more athletic, and more able to compete in ways that I certainly didn’t see 30-plus years ago.”
Peter Murrary is president of the Maine Association of Basketball Coaches and was the longtime boys coach at Dexter High School. He sees the increase of talented young players flowing from several factors, including shrinking rosters and more options for players to train outside of normal high school competition.
“I think it’s correlated with the shrinking of schools, where people have been more reliant on eighth graders to fill rosters,” Murray explained. “At one point it was eighth graders just to fill the rosters so we could have a team to practice. Now it’s eighth graders that are starting in games or being the first sub off the bench and being counted on to perform. But I think it’s a direct correlation to the downsizing of schools.”
And he has stopped referring to kids by their grade entirely, given how common it has become to have talented young players.
“I just don’t even think of it that way anymore,” Murray said. “If they’ve got the skills to play at this level, then they’re going to be out there playing.”
Murray highlighted Pelletier and Brathwaite as two freshmen in particular who stand out for their physicality.
“When you look at them physically, you would never guess that that’s a freshman,” he said about the Madawaska and Cony players. “And then you put a skill level with it, they’re going to play against anybody.”
Butler said that the excitement surrounding the freshmen is beneficial for Maine basketball.
“It’s good for the game, good for the communities,” Butler said. “And I’ve heard more than a few ‘He’s a freshman’ chants, or ‘She’s a freshman’ chants.'”
Murray also thinks the trend has been fueled in part by the success of the most famous freshman to ever play in Maine high school basketball: Cooper Flagg.
Flagg, who won a state championship in his one year playing at Nokomis Regional High School in Newport, has helped shift the notion of what’s possible for young Maine players.
“There is an influx, for sure. There’s a lot of them, and I think the preponderance of training facilities, training opportunities, was maybe not there in the old days,” Murray said. “So they’re getting trained earlier. And there’s got to be some kind of a Cooper Flagg effect here too to a certain extent where kids say, ‘Hey, why not me?'”
Flagg’s longtime trainer, Matt MacKenzie agrees that this has been a particularly good year for Maine freshmen. And he has trained or coached several of them.
“I can’t recall a freshman class as deep as the one that we’re watching right now,” MacKenzie said at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor this week. “They have talent all over the state.”
MacKenzie owns Eastern Maine Sports Academy and Results Basketball in Veazie, providing the type of training opportunities that Murray highlighted. MacKenzie also has coached Brathwaite, Pelletier and Watkins on the same AAU team.
“And the really neat thing is that a lot of them have supported each other, played together for so many years, whether it’s at camps and AAU, or training together,” MacKenzie said about this year’s talented group of freshmen. “And they all kind of challenge and push each other, and keep tabs on each other’s success, which I think is just really great.”
Pelletier arrived back in Bangor for this year’s tournament with an eye on a state championship, one year removed from his astounding run as an eighth grader.
“It just feels like we’ve been here before, which we have,” he said after Madawaska advanced through the quarterfinals. “It just feels nice to already have that experience.”
Both he and Watkins will look to extend their teams’ seasons on Saturday. And while Cony’s run has come to a close, Brathwaite certainly impressed the fans at the Bangor tournament.
His Cony coach and father, Isaiah Brathwaite, said the freshman has a maturity beyond his years and has weathered the high pressure this year by keeping his emotions in check and staying humble.
“He carries himself well,” the Cony coach said about his son and freshman guard.
Another of central Maine’s rising stars, Quintana of Gardiner, also had an impressive Class B North tournament in Bangor.
“She improved every game this season. She did everything I asked from her, she worked so hard in practice, and today it really showed,” said Gardiner girls coach Britney Gero. “So I’m beyond proud of her. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for her. I think by her senior year, she’ll be unstoppable.”
That same could be said for several members of this impressive freshman class, who have already looked pretty unstoppable at times during this year’s tournament.