Hampden Academy’s boys and girls soccer teams have each averaged only five regular season wins the past six seasons.
Both teams are now calling upon two former Bronco players and assistant coaches to return the programs to their winning ways.
Gerald Cushing is the new boys coach and Jason Sharpe is the girls coach.
The boys have gone 30-47-7 over the past six seasons including a 7-6-1 mark last fall. The girls have posted a 30-44-10 record including a 6-6-2 campaign a year ago.
The boys have had two winning seasons over the past six, while the girls have had only one.
Hampden was the first community in the Bangor area to adopt youth travel programs and Hampden Academy became the beneficiary with strong high school teams. But other communities in the area followed suit and the Broncos’ level of success has tailed off in recent years.
Now Cushing and Sharpe are looking to return Hampden soccer to its former glory.
“It’s kind of cool to have two Hampden guys who have been part of this area and community wanting to do well for Hampden Academy and the community itself,” said the 35-year-old Cushing. “I’m really happy to be back at my old school.”
Sharpe, who is 52, pointed out that the new girls junior varsity coach is Amanda Shaw, who is another Hampden Academy alum that knows what it’s like to play in home playoff games for Hampden.
“The two of us are excited to be part of this program with our student-athletes,” Sharpe said about his assistant coach.
Cushing spent the previous three seasons as the assistant coach under Don Erb at Bangor High School and was also previously an assistant at John Bapst High of Bangor and Hampden Academy. He was the JV coach at John Bapst and Hampden Academy, too.
Cushing, a 2009 Hampden graduate, remembers the heyday of Hampden Academy soccer and said he hopes to bring that back.
“We have a big senior class that I’m excited about. We’ve set some goals for the year and we’re hoping to achieve those,” said Cushing, whose preseason schedule includes several games against good teams in the southern part of the state.
“We want to play some of the best teams in the state to get us ready for the regular season,” said Cushing, who played his college soccer at Saint Joseph’s College in Standish.
He said he is employing a “defense-first” mentality with the team and is bringing back some traditions from past coaching regimes.
“What we’re really focusing on is the effort. It’s one-through-21 putting in the effort in every practice, it’s making each other work,” Cushing said. “The games shouldn’t be high-scoring. They should be very competitive games and when the teams leave the field, they’re going to know they had to put some work in to beat us or at least compete with us.”
He said the top five teams in Class A North have been Lewiston, Camden Hills of Rockport, Brunswick, Mt. Ararat of Topsham and Edward Little of Auburn. And his goal is to “separate ourselves from the bottom seven and join the top five and earn a home playoff game.”
The top four teams in the heal points standings earn home playoff berths.
Sharpe began his coaching career coaching soccer and basketball at the recreation and travel levels before becoming a volunteer varsity assistant and then the JV coach at Hampden Academy.
“We are going to take a team-first mentality. We have an incredible group of student-athletes. These girls are fantastic,” Sharpe said. “We’re going to try to develop ourselves as a team first and really work on developing each one of the individuals to make sure they have clear roles and responsibilities that fit into that team environment.”
He expects constant improvement throughout the season.
Sharpe hopes for this to be the first of many where the program continues to build and is able to interact with younger players coming up from both the travel and rec soccer ranks.
The Broncos won’t be defense-first or offense-first according to Sharpe, a 1991 Hampden graduate who went on to play baseball at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont.
“We’re going to play fast, play high [up the field] and really focus on trying to score. As a team, we want to set up those opportunities for each other,” Sharpe said. “We know we’re going to make mistakes but we aren’t going to focus on those mistakes, We’re going to focus on the positives. We’re going to go out and execute on our plan and really support each other.”
