When a high school team brings home a coveted state championship, the players are sometimes greeted by a town parade of supporters welcoming the conquering heroes home.
When the Stearns-Schenck cooperative football team returned from its 8-man small school state title win on Saturday, their parade stretched through three towns.
In a powerful example of inter-community alchemy, Stearns High School of Millinocket and Schenck High School of East Millinocket have taken a historic rivalry between towns and turned it into a championship gold ball as teammates.
Schenck High School also includes students from neighboring Medway, so when the victorious Minutemen returned from the title game in Auburn on Saturday night, all three towns were in on the celebration.
“Everybody from Medway, and East Millinocket, and Millinocket has just joined up to support these young kids, and it’s just really amazing,” said Stearns athletic director and assistant football coach Nick Cullen. “It shows me that, us working together, it can create some really great things. And I think this football team is just a testament of what we can accomplish when everybody works together and are on the same team.”
Head coach Cody Herring said a line of cars was waiting to welcome the team home as soon as they got off the interstate in Medway on Saturday night, and that raucous welcome stretched all the way through East Millinocket and Millinocket as the bus returned to Stearns High School.
“The support was just truly overwhelming in that moment,” Herring said. “But you know, it’s a testament to the community pride that we have in the tri-town area.”
For that pride to stretch across town lines is no small thing. The last time the Minutemen brought home a gold ball, it was 1998 and they were exclusively a team of Stearns players. Schenck was still decidedly a rival — at least in basketball, as it didn’t have a football team.
And that rivals-to-teammates arc isn’t the only difference between now and then.
The once-bustling mills in each town have since shuttered, and an aging population has forced town and school leaders to re-assess the once clear dividing lines between the communities.
The cooperative football team is a reflection of that changed reality, and the Minutemen have proven that collaboration across town lines isn’t only possible, it can be powerful.
The once-unthinkable alliance on the field has led to almost indescribable success for the players and coaches at the center of it.
Senior co-captain Trevor VanDine, one of the four players hailing from Schenck on the 20-man roster, could scarcely believe the scene that greeted the team as they returned Saturday night.
“It was kind of like an out of body experience,” VanDine said. “Like, it didn’t feel real.”
But the gold ball now sitting in the Stearns trophy case proves just how real it was. And it took an entire team to realize that dream.
“It’s a true team effort,” Herring said. “We only have 20 kids, but every one of those kids played a big role in what we did all season long.”
One team, three towns
There was a fitting symmetry in the Minutemen’s first two touchdowns during Saturday’s state final against Old Orchard Beach.
Lucas Pelkey, a Stearns senior co-captain and 1,000-yard rusher on the season, stepped up to provide the team’s first score of the day.
After Pelkey’s roughly 30-yard rush, VanDine added the next six points for the Minutemen with a fourth down touchdown catch from about 25 yards out.
To outside observers, those initial scores from Pelkey of Stearns and VanDine of Schenck provided a tangible example of the co-op’s success at melding players from different towns. But to the team, there was never any such dividing line.
“We don’t think of it as kids from Stearns, kids from Schenck,” Cullen explained. “They’re just football players. And they all get along.”
Both Pelkey and VanDine described the on-the-field teamwork and off-the-field friendships that transcend town lines.
“I think it’s kind of funny — football season we’re together, and then basketball and baseball season we go play each other. And then later that night, we go hang out,” Pelkey said. “We’re all friends, we’re not necessarily rivals like we used to be. But we definitely have a competitiveness between the two schools.”
VanDine had a similar message.
“We’re all teammates. Nobody treats anybody different just because they go to a different school,” VanDine said. “We’re all friends at the end of the day.”
That mentality clearly paid off on the football field, and it is cycling through the towns as well.
Kristi Davis, a co-owner of Millinocket Floral & Gift whose boyfriend is a team assistant coach, was a Stearns cheerleader years ago during a previous state title run. She noted how this year’s win takes on new significance with the three towns combining forces.
“So I think that’s huge, too, because it’s starting to bring the towns together,” Davis said.
‘We just need a stop’
None of the celebrating would be possible if not for the effort of the Minutemen defense at the end of Saturday’s game. Facing a dynamic offensive team in returning champion Old Orchard, Stearns/Schenck was looking for a different result after falling to the Seagulls in the state championship a year ago.
And the Minutemen prevented history from repeating itself, while making their own multi-school history in the process.
Two different defensive stops helped the Minutemen secure the title. After junior running back Cohen Raymond gave Stearns/Schenck its third touchdown and a 20-12 lead, Old Orchard responded with a touchdown of its own.
But the gritty Minutemen defense rallied for a team tackle during the subsequent two-point conversion, with what felt like the entire defense combining to keep the Seagulls out of the endzone and preserve the two-point lead.
“Coach is always preaching eight men pursuing to the football,” Pelkey said about that play. “And eight men pursued to the football and stopped them short of the goal line.”
As Pelkey acknowledged, the Minutemen may not have returned home with the gold ball if not for that play.
And it wasn’t long before the defense was called on again. After Old Orchard intercepted the ball and started marching toward the endzone again, it looked like the returning champs might find another way to dash the Minutemen’s hopes.
Cullen said he and Herring turned to each other in that pivotal moment.
“We just need a stop. We need one big play,” was their shared sentiment, Cullen said. “And fortunately for us, we got it. One of those endings that nobody’s ever going to forget.”
That unforgettable ending came courtesy of freshmen Jackson Savage and Lincoln Daisey, who combined to force a fumble and recover it, sealing the win for the Minutemen.
Now those Minutemen will be remembered for years to come, by a legion of young kids who idolize the high school players, and by the many alumni who are thrilled to see another state championship after the decades-long drought.
Years before he was the Schenck athletic director, John Montgomery was actually a standout Stearns athlete, including on the football team
“It is definitely very, very special to see,” Montgomery said. “And I was at the state game on Saturday, and being a former Stearns High School football player, it definitely gave me goosebumps.”
Bigger than a football game
Ann Warren spent time as a substitute teacher in both Millinocket and East Millinocket, and her kids were participating in performing arts programming shared between the two towns long before the sports teams combined forces.
That continued push toward more collaboration is long overdue, Warren said.
“It’s about time,” she said in downtown Millinocket. “We really need to.”
Warren pointed to the large volume of people in the area who have been going to football games this season, some traveling halfway across the state for the state championship. And she’s even heard people talking in the grocery store about passing up hunting to go support the team instead — and that’s no small thing.
The team’s impact has reverberated throughout the communities, including among local leaders.
“It’s a huge point of pride and shows the strength and success of collaboration, and efforts of partnership between our three neighboring towns and schools,” said Millinocket Town Manager Peter Jamieson. “I believe that it helps to prove the case for more collaboration and partnership in the future.”
Kirsten Hutchins, another Stearns graduate who now coaches the girls basketball team at Schenck, sees great value in the towns coming together.
“It’s really nice to see two towns on the same page for one goal,” Hutchins said.
It hasn’t always been easy in the area in recent years, but the collaboration is providing an opportunity for people to come together.
“With the mills going down all those years ago, it’s still tremendous how people step up and support these young adults,” Montgomery said, noting that applies to all other sports and other school activities as well.
Cullen, the Stearns athletic director and assistant coach, also pointed to that community support and said the experience ended up being “bigger than a football game.”
Cullen credited Herring, a former Stearns player, for re-instilling a culture of hard work in his nine years at the helm of the program. And current players like Pelkey have embraced that work ethic.
“He sets the tone,” Cullen said about Pelkey, who is usually already in the weightroom working out when Cullen arrives at school at 6:30 a.m. “This kid puts in more work than anybody I’ve ever seen, and I think it shows on and off the field.”
The entire team embodied that commitment on Saturday, joining together to finally track down that elusive state championship.
“Coach told us before the game and all week, we can’t let the game come to us,” Pelkey said. “We have to go out and take it.”
That’s what they did — for themselves, and for the three towns that came together to support them.
