In March 2023 I met with Radio Midcoast WCME’s Jim Bliekamp to discuss a proposal to do some local high school sports coverage. Jim was familiar with my photography and he knew my “voice” from some of my other community engagement efforts.
Within the constraints of my day job, I felt I could get to two high school events a week and provide WCME with a half-dozen quality photographs for each event and perhaps 300 words of reporting. Jim would post the photos and text to WCME’s Facebook page and use the written summary in his news segments to highlight local performances and to promote upcoming events for the community.
Based on my experience as the parent of high school athletes over the last ten years I knew parents would appreciate the coverage, the photography, and the ease with which the information could be shared with other family members and friends. These factors seemed likely to enhance the WCME Facebook page and also provide context and detail for WCME’s on air local sports coverage.
Morse, Mt. Ararat, and Brunswick High Schools were the focus as these schools are the least well represented by regional print media. These programs and these athletes get little attention unless their team makes a deep playoff run against teams from the Portland area.
Five long overtimes were needed for Brunswick to defeat Cheverus-Yarmouth in the 2022 Quarterfinals of the Maine State High School Championships. Brunswick would go on to oust Greely in the semi-final before winning the State Championship over Camden Hills. WCME radio carried the quarterfinal game live.
The plan was to cover home games only with exception of late season big games or playoffs. I hoped to spread the coverage across the three schools, across genders, and across the different spring season sports. Using mpaschedules.org I charted out a schedule and tried to pick days when one school would be hosting multiple events.
The photos went up with my watermark and WCME would credit my work.
This covers the nuts and bolts but does not answer the larger of the two questions I was asked most frequently this spring.
Why? What motivated me to do this?
And second, do you get paid? (No).
The “Why” is a longer story.
It might start with a man named Dave Bourque who once upon a time was a sports writer from the Times Record. It’s easy to sound like a geezer when reflecting on local sports coverage, or even local news coverage. I remember when the Times Record had five beat reporters, an editorial department, a sports department with full-time reporters and its own editor. There were full-time photographers too. The TR even hired summer interns to keep up with the annual Pogy kills and other summer festivals. But local print news is a mere whisper of its former self, and regional sports coverage here in the Midcoast is virtually non-existent.
Brunswick, Morse, and Mt. Ararat, the schools of the Quabacook, are in a sports gore. Gore is a surveyor’s term for an irregular piece of land, usually triangular, that gets left off of maps because of conflicting or overlaying adjacent surveys. Coburn Gore, is a familiar one, there is even a gore in Franklin County called the Massachusetts Gore. Just as these places have been left behind in map making, Brunswick, Morse and Mt. Ararat are left off of the maps of Maine High School Sports coverage..
The Portland papers, relying on the work of the Forecaster come as far north as Freeport just the other side of Bunganuc from Brunswick. But Freeport generally competes with the suburban Portland schools like Yarmouth and Greely. The Sun Journal, which does a great job covering high schools sports (though oddly fixated on St. Dom’s) may reach down as far as Lisbon, just across the town line from Topsham’s Mt. Ararat. Morse is even further from the action.
Morse High School’s Sarah Ouellette clears 11-00 in the pole vault competition during a KVAC meet at Mt. Ararat in May 2022. Ouellette’s best jumps of the season would have had her competing for a podium position in the Class A State meet—-for men—-but her prowess is mostly unknown in the area outside of hardcore track and field fans.
Aside from Lacrosse, my own high school sports career was a mediocrity. Even so, if you want to go spin some microfiche reels down at the library you’ll find my name and even the occasional photo from back in the day.
Since the fall of 2014 when my oldest child entered grade nine at Brunswick, I have had kids engaged in High School Sports. It has been a long haul. Girls Soccer, Cross-Country, Track & Field in all its permutations, Field Hockey, Swim, Crew, Boys Ice Hockey, and Boys Soccer. Highlights include captaincies, coaches awards, innumerable KVAC honors and regional championships, the renaissance of the Brunswick Field Hockey team to perennial playoff contender, podium positions at State Track championships, going out on a limb to cox the four women boat, two state championships, including Brunswick’s first ever in Men’s Ice Hockey, and one Warren “Baron” Pearl Award.
But you’ll find barely a mention in the local papers. Sure, sure the State Championships got covered but always with a bit of head scratching about what Brunswick was doing there in the first place.
And I’ve been there all along, starting with coaching in BYSL and Dragons soccer, painful monthly meetings in Augusta with the Maine Amateur Hockey Association when I was President Midcoast Youth Hockey, keeping the scorebook for Cal Ripken games while my wife, Beth, dutifully did shift after shift in snack-bars around town.
But more important photos, photos, photos, and more photos. I even turned my oldest’s running career into a paying gig when, from 2016-2019, I worked for MaineMilesplit, Maine’s premiere source for information about cross country and track & field. I covered meets, wrote articles, interviewed athletes and coaches, and posted thousands of photos. It offered me an intimate, up-close and personal look at the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
My oldest Isabella, BHS, 2018, taking first place in her heat of the 1600 at the State Class A Meet at Massabesic High School in June 2017. She would end the day on the podium with a fifth place ribbon. This photo was taken as part of my coverage for MaineMileSplit.
So when my youngest child’s final ice hockey season came to an abrupt halt in March, I faced an existential crisis.
What would I do now?
It is no exaggeration to say that a solid three-quarters of people I have assumed to be my friends over the last fifteen years are folks I’ve spent time with on the sidelines—from tee-ball at Edward’s Field on up to State Finals at the Cross Arena.
I considered refereeing. I have heard the plaintive calls over the PA at every game. I could even get some exercise and earn a little extra money. I’d already done all the coaching certifications for soccer and hockey so the referee licensing would be a breeze.
When facing an existential crisis good cheer, hopefulness, and optimism seem important. The harangues of high school coaches and, even worse, Mr & Mrs. “Call-It-Both-Ways” up in the stands were not going to do the trick.
I considered reconnecting with MaineMilesplit. It’s a great platform for expansive and fair treatment of Maine High School Athletes. It’s data driven so performances get covered no matter if you’re from Cape Elizabeth or Mattanawcook. But it is not a great platform for photography. I take some time with my photography, I want to see the grains of sand in the jumping pits, I want to see wide eyes, tendons taut with effort, and lit up faces.
And those are the things I want to share.
Barely recognizable behind this wall of sand, Brunswick’s Maddie Chaput is an emotive competitor when you can see her face. This is the kind of granularity I am looking for in sports photography .Among the competitors from Mt. Ararat and Brunswick High Schools at the 2023 KVAC Track and Field Championships
And the sports gore intrigued me.
A friend from my day job had spent a long time working in Maine sports journalism. He knew the challenges faced by the kids from Morse, Brunswick, and Mt. Ararat. Over the winter, we spent a lot of time talking high school sports, coaching styles, talented kids and the like. His kids are active in athletics too but play different sports than my kids so we covered a lot of ground and had varied perspectives on some things.
He’d seen me shooting photos of a Brunswick Women’s basketball game against a great Oxford Hills squad so he asked, what I was doing with all the photos?
The short answer is that I have a web site to promote my photography business and a companion book selling business. It also serves as a repository for any random ideas and notions I might have; it can be a bit of a mental junk drawer. I post game galleries that the Brunswick hockey and soccer communities always looked forward to; I figured the women’s basketball players would like it too and a few instagram posts would have their attention.
It would be fair to say that over the years Brunswick soccer and hockey players have known where to find me when a celebration needs to be captured. Lately, through coverage in WCME, the limelight has been shone on other regional teams too .Gallery: Brunswick 6 Lewiston 0, Northern Maine Regional Soccer Championships 2022.
But this was the first high school basketball game I had been to since my own high school days. I was not good at the photography piece. Beth and I had been planning on going to a game for a couple of years. Friends had kids on the team but my son’s hockey always had priority. The Oxford Hills game was a good one, their team was the top of class of AA basketball, the gym was packed, every drum kit and drummer from the Brunswick Music programs was there.
We were hooked. And I had a chance, over a few games, to begin to figure out where to look next on a basketball court.
A few weeks later I was at a playoff game in the Expo down in Portland. From where I shot my photos I could hear the knowledgable WCME radio crew of Jim Trusiani and Coach John Coughlin doing play-by-play and game analysis. I knew the local radio station broadcast some local high school football live, and more important to me, had broadcast Brunswick High’s epic five overtime quarterfinal win over Cheverus/Yarmouth during their run to the 2022 State Championship.
As I listened and made photos of what I was seeing described by the radio crew, the seeds for this spring project were sown.
I am happy to have been able to do it. There were definite gaps in my coverage, mainly due to weather and work conflicts. I found myself unable to honor my word count; there were stories to tell and they often ran to 750 or 1000 words. This in turn limited my ability to cover more events. Last, as the season wore on, I focused more on the programs likely to make deep runs in the playoffs.