Every year, there are unique situations and firsts in Maine sports, but 2025 brought an unusually high number of them.
At the professional level, the state was consumed by Flaggdemonium.
Cooper Flagg from Newport was not only the first Maine native to be chosen first overall in the NBA draft, he has also gone on to become the youngest player in NBA history to score over 40 points in a game.
The 6-foot-9 Flagg entered the week averaging over 19 points, six rebounds and nearly four assists per game.
He didn’t turn 19 until Dec. 21.
His twin brother Ace Flagg was instrumental in a significant boost in season ticket sales for the University of Maine’s basketball team where he is a freshman in Orono.
Down the road in Hermon, one Hall of Famer sold a race track to another Hall of Famer as two Maine racing legends consummated a deal that saw Del Merritt sell Speedway 95 to Newburgh’s Ricky Craven.
Merritt, a Maine Motorsports Hall of Famer, began his affiliation with the track in 1968 when friend Dana Crockett asked him to be his assistant flagman. Nine years later, he became part owner of the track and he became the sole owner in 2011 before selling it to Craven this year.
Craven, who has been inducted into the Maine Motorsports Hall along with the Maine Sports Hall of Fame and the New England Auto Racers Hall, had long coveted the track and has a long and impressive racing resume which includes two wins, 17 top-five finishes and 41 top-10s in his 278-race Winston Cup (now NASCAR Cup) career.
Craven also won races in the Xfinity and Truck series.
The Flaggs have put Newport on the map in a big way with their basketball prowess, but the town also saw success in golf this year.
Nokomis High School of Newport won its first ever Class B state golf title behind medalist SJ Welch, who atoned for a mistake the previous year when he reported himself for playing the wrong ball in a qualifying tournament.
In this year’s state final, Welch shot a four-over par 76 in tough conditions at the Natanis Golf Course in Vassalboro to earn medalist honors.
He told the Bangor Daily News that the team and individual state championships gave him a feeling “you can’t really put into words.”
And he said his decision to report himself the previous year was the correct one.
“I couldn’t live with playing the wrong ball and not telling anyone. I always try to do the right thing,” said Welch, who added that he and his teammates used that situation as motivation this season.
Good Sportsmanship was also front and center in an odd situation involving the John Bapst and Houlton cooperative boys hockey teams this year.
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Houlton forgot its jerseys and had to borrow John Bapst’s gray jerseys while the Crusaders wore their black jerseys for the Class B North quarterfinal at Sawyer Arena in Bangor.
‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this,” said Houlton coach Tony Marino. “It was really bizarre. It was hard to keep track of who was who.”
John Bapst center Will Bourgeois said it was “a little weird” looking at the other team and seeing their own jerseys, and said it was a confusing situation.
It may have confused the Crusaders, but they triumphed 5-0 and went on to earn their first ever Class B North championship and state title game appearance.
Back on the golf course, Freeport’s Eli Spaulding had a record-setting year.
Not only did he become the first Maine native in 34 years to win both the Maine Amateur and New England Amateur tournaments in the same year, he also captured the Maine Match Play Invitational.
Spaulding, who plays out of the Brunswick Golf Club, is believed to be the first time anyone won all three tournaments according to Brian Bickford, the executive director of the Maine Golf Association.
Spaulding is currently a sophomore at Loyola University in Maryland and posted three top-10 finishes and an 11th in five tournaments this fall.
There were plenty of firsts in Maine college sports this year, as well, especially in Orono.
The UMaine women’s cross country team won its first America East championship ever.
The Black Bears women’s soccer team came out of the fourth seed to win its third straight America East championship including road wins over No. 2 Vermont and No. 1 Binghamton.
The men’s hockey team won its first Hockey East tournament championship since 2004 and earned its second straight NCAA Tournament berth.
The men’s basketball team reached the America East title game for the first time since 2004.
And for the first time ever, players from Canada’s three Major Junior Hockey leagues are eligible to play U.S. college hockey this season. That has changed the Division I landscape. There is a lot of parity and any number of teams are capable of claiming the NCAA Division I title.
Entering the Christmas break, 17 of the teams ranked in the Top 20 in the two major polls had at least four losses.
The University of Maine has certainly benefitted from the inclusion of Major Junior players as longtime Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League winger Justin Poirier is the nation’s second-leading goal scorer with 17 in 19 games. He is fifth in goals per game at .89 and 10th in points per game at 1.37. He has nine assists to go with his 17 goals.
In another first, long-time rivals Bangor and Brewer have merged into one hockey team due to the dwindling number of players. They are called the Twin City Titans and are co-coached by Bangor’s Quinn Paradis and Brewer’s Denis Collins.
Orono’s Ruth White, a distance runner for the University of New Hampshire, earned second team All-American honors as a freshman by finishing ninth in the NCAA Division I outdoor national championship’s 10,000-meter run with a school-record time of 32:20.60.
She was named America East’s Women’s Track and Field Athlete of the Year and was the America East championships’ Rookie of the Year.
The Bangor High School girls soccer team’s 1-0 win over Scarborough in the state Class A final gave the Rams back-to-back state soccer championships for the first time in school history. For the second straight season, Georgie Stephenson scored the game-winner for Jay Kemble’s Rams.
Westbrook High School won its first-ever state football title, beating Cony of Augusta in the B championship game.
The Penobscot Valley High School girls basketball team went undefeated and won its first ever state Class C state title before the girls soccer team went on to notch its third consecutive state D championship in the fall.
Caribou captured both the boys and girls Class B state championship for the first time ever — the girls with a miraculous comeback and the boys with a convincing victory.
It will be interesting to see if 2026 can come anywhere near this year in terms of unique situations and firsts. 2025 will be a tough act to follow.
