Every other week, the 26 members of Presque Isle’s indoor track and field team pile into a school bus and drive two and a half hours south to Orono to practice at the University of Maine.
Senior Garrett White breaks out his speaker and plays music. The team talks and laughs and sings and gathers together to play games. The social deduction game Mafia has been their go-to of late. They try to avoid the ire of the bus driver.
“I feel like we’re a really fun team. We’re all super talkative, it’s never quiet,” Lucy Cheney, a junior sprinter, said.
They might not get home until 10 or 11 p.m. And three days later, they have to turn around and do it again for a meet — all of which are also held at UMaine’s New Balance Field House.
Many of the more than 50 Maine high schools that sponsor the sport have to travel a meaningful distance to practice or compete. None have to go farther than Presque Isle.
Nobody minds, the athletes say. It’s the cost of joining Maine’s northernmost indoor track team, far from the state’s few competition-legal indoor tracks. And in its second year of existence, the team is thriving in spite of that challenge, or perhaps because of it.
“I think it’s something that we definitely have to overcome,” White said. “But I think every team has something like that. It’s just that ours is a little tougher than others.”
‘We’re able to bring something different.’
On the days they’re not trekking to Orono, you might catch the Wildcats sprinting through a second-floor hallway of Presque Isle High School, or working out on the elevated three-lane track at the University of Maine at Presque Isle.
They’ll lay down a pair of roll-out runways — long, portable rubber mats — and practice starts or hurdles, bounding out of the blocks past a science classroom or their homeroom.
The hallways in the high school’s main wing are roughly 100 meters long, allowing head coach Randall Himes to work a longer distance into sprint workouts. But tile flooring is not an ideal surface to run on, and the short turns and straightaways of UMPI’s track make it difficult to achieve or maintain speed.
“We’ve had to try to tailor it,” Himes said. “One of my philosophies is that you don’t learn to run fast by running slow, but unfortunately we have to kind of run slower than I would like to so we don’t cause injuries running around those turns and things like that.”
Workouts for distance runners are difficult when it’s 10 degrees below zero and you can’t run outside, Himes said. And field events, like long jump, pole vault or shot put, require some ingenuity to practice without the proper facilities.
Those quirks can make for awkward or difficult practices, which, in the fledgling team’s estimation, is much better than having none at all.
Presque Isle has a long history of producing successful track and field athletes during the outdoor track and field season in the spring, where it often boasts teams of 50-plus students.
But before 2024, it had never sponsored an indoor team. Several years prior, Himes, noticing that some of his standout athletes played no winter sport, began to gauge interest from students and the school’s administration. It launched the team last school year.
“It kind of became more of a question of, ‘Well, why can’t we do indoor track to prepare the kids to be better for outdoor?’” Himes said.
Thirteen athletes qualified for the Class B state championship meet in that inaugural season, roughly half of the team. Seventeen of the 26 competing for Presque Isle this season had already met qualifying marks for the Penobscot Valley Conference/Eastern Maine Indoor Track League championship by early January.
“The original plan was that if we could get at least 20 kids doing it, then we would have considered that a success, and so far, the two years that we’ve done it, there’s been 25-plus, so we figure that’s a good starting point,” Himes said.
The team’s athletes have already seen benefits carry over into the outdoor track season and beyond, and some have set personal records.
“I think it helped me a lot,” said Hailey Himes, Randall Himes’ daughter and a senior hurdler. “I didn’t have a great sophomore outdoor season, but going from indoor last year, I already PRed in our first outdoor meet. I think indoor had a lot to do with that.”
“I had a lot more PRs in cross country,” Aleah Rideout, a sophomore distance runner, said. “And especially on my long runs, I felt like I had a lot more endurance and I felt like I could breathe a lot better.”
Adding indoor track means a core group of Presque Isle’s outdoor athletes are practicing and competing together for six months straight, evening the playing field with their Class B peers, many of whom have long competed during the winter.
That extended season, the long travel and the smaller roster has also created a greater sense of camaraderie within the team, Himes and his athletes said.
“We kind of have to be friends with each other,” Hailey Himes joked.
And at a time where declining enrollment and sport specialization has shrunk rosters and forced schools to combine or eliminate teams, Presque Isle has introduced new athletes and a new variable into the equation of indoor track and field in Maine.
“I think the other teams downstate have received us well,” Randall Himes said. “I hope they appreciate what we put in to get there and to make sure that we’re competing and that we’re able to bring something different.”
