The Hands-Off Period
Rounding up the Lobster Bowl, the Jaylen Trade, and a whole lot more!
So how's your summer going?
For obvious reasons the newsletter slows down considerably during the summer, but let's go through some stuff that's piled up since the last one, including a couple of new things you'll want to know about. Spoiler: this got long. Sorry, not sorry.
The Lobster Bowl was a massive success, blowing away the record for fundraising set the year before, both for an individual (Medomak's Logan Vigue raised $26,592) and overall ($318,889). The weather wasn't perfect and you got a little wet if you were in the stands, but considering their was toxic wildfire smoke from Canada in play and it can always be a humid 95 degrees in July, we got lucky.
Maine Public's broadcast of the game was also stellar. Rob Kennedy and Rob Munzing did their usual fantastic job on the call, with Jack Webb killing it on the sideline. It was a top-notch production from top to bottom.
If you watched the broadcast, you'll notice the inclusion of stats. There were team stats and the usual down and distance. ALL of that came, in real time, from the football scoring app I've been working on.
For years, the white whale has been how to incorporate the live stats from tourney week into the TV and streaming broadcasts for Maine Public and WHOU. The hurdle has always been a technology missing from from the app I used, so this off-season I took it upon myself to build my own app using Claude. I've been testing it all spring for baseball and softball, which was a challenge. The Lobster Bowl was the first test of both the football functionality and the broadcast integration and it passed with flying colors. Maine Public was able to pull in real time the down & distance from the app with the only delay being how quickly I could figure out where the ball was being spotted.
It fed live stats you could follow in real time on your phone or computer (I needed a spotter for tackles) and generated a pdf game report.
I find this pretty cool and if you subscribe to this newsletter, I'm guessing you might as well.
And...there's more.
I've been hitting this pretty hard and I can now tell you with quite a bit of confidence (call it 95%) that there's going to be an app.
An App???
Yes! An app!
I'm dotting the i's and crossing the t's on an iPad app that will allow you to score any Maine high school game in basketball, football, soccer, field hockey, baseball, softball, and lacrosse. All in the same app. It will sync with the MPA schedule so you can bring up the day's matchups, find the game you want, and be ready to roll. It'll pull rosters from the site, will feed the scoreboard, and update a live page (so grandma can follow along from Florida) in real time then generate stats and a PDF you can send to the newspaper/TV and the team. It'll also automatically generate a stat feed that a streamer can use to sync their broadcast (provided their software can handle a XML feed).
It's going to be a pretty killer app. I haven't landed on pricing yet, but it'll be offered at a considerable discount for subscribers to the website.
It will also let you score non-MPA games.
As in, it'll let you score any game at any level. It can score your AAU game or your youth football game or you can take it to Fenway and score the Red Sox or the Hearts of Pine at Fitzy. You name it.
I'm pretty sure it'll be available for beta testing in TestFlight (that's Apple's testing thing) by the end of the week. If you'd like to try it out before it goes wide in the App Store, email me [mainebasketballrankings at gmail dot com].
There's also going to be a browser version you can just use on your laptop in the press box or the bleachers. Perfect for an assistant coach or team manager or parent who yells at the refs too much and needs something to do.
You've undoubtedly heard a million takes about the Jaylen Brown trade by now, many of them terrible. As always with Celtics news, Jon Duke came on the podcast to sort it all out.
We go into the trade, the overall Celtics offseason and what the second apron has done to Brad Stevens' plans.
And, of course, we talk about next season in high school basketball, why the Ringer needs to hire an editor for their podcast network, the state of sports media and how it's all kind of broken.
And a whole lot more.
Check out the complete episode on YouTube or wherever you podcast.
More to come!
Subscriber Information
In some housekeeping news, prices have gone up on subscriber plans. When I initially priced this at $6/month, it was kind of a guess and I apparently guessed below the market. Whoops!
But the prices of everything are going up--from Hannaford to Streamyard to everything in-between--and the costs of the new website features like the app and how you can now log a score as the buzzer sounds and the Heal Points will be updated before the teams even make it to the handshake line and not nothing and, well, it was time to raise prices. So it goes.
BUT! There's a couple hundred people who have been here from the beginning--the OGs--and I didn't want to raise prices on them, so if you were in the club on August 1st, you're grandfathered in at $6/month. Now, if you cancel and re-up you'll lose the old pricing. So, that's a math problem for you to figure out.
I've also finally added an annual plan and from now until the end of the hands-off period, there's a sale of 10% off the annual plan.
Get 10% off an annual plan before practices kick off.
Join the Peter Webb All-Stars
There's always a need for officials. As far as part-time jobs go, you could do a lot worse. It's a great way to stay involved in the game after you've hung it up and you'll quickly find yourself in a community of like-minded officials, coaches, ADs, and media folk. Plus you get a front row seat to some of the best athletes in the state.
There's football courses starting in Bangor.
Ben Barr
And basketball courses for high school students.
It's $60 for the basketball classes, but you can make that back almost immediately once you get assigned games.
One of the bigger summer ball events every year is the Cony Summer League. They get 18 teams from A down to S for a regular season and playoffs and while summer ball has the obvious caveats (it's anyone's guess which player is on family vacation or playing with their AAU team or whatever), doing well in the Cony League is usually a good indicator of regular season success. Last year, Gardiner and Camden met in the title game and both of those teams had pretty, pretty good years.
Everyone has Maranacook on their Gold Ball shortlist. They reached the title game with a win over Medomak Valley, but ran into an Erskine team that beat Mount Blue in the semis, then shot the lights out in the first half and pulled away down the stretch to grab the crown. Not bad for a 7 seed!
Time to add Erskine to your teams to watch in B North.
Hearts of Pine is eyeing a new home.
Hearts of Pine Staff
Do you want to see the worst tech you've seen in a long time?
This was the play during which Caitlin Clark received her 8th technical of the season, triggering a 1-game suspension unless it is rescinded:pic.twitter.com/k2uorN8mUR
— Underdog WNBA (@UnderdogWNBA) August 8, 2026
The WNBA rescinded this almost immediately. The ref will probably get a State game.
Speaking of State games...mark your calendars.
If it were up to me, I'd stretch this out a little. Instead of 1 game on Friday and 4 on Saturday, let's move a game to Thursday and one to Monday so we avoid having two games going on at once. Most kids will only play once for a Gold Ball and we should do what we can to give them the full spotlight.
Finally, a movie recommendation.
The Odyssey is quite good and Hail Mary is impressive, but for me the film of the year so far is a little indie from Canada. I tend to lean indie anyway, but Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is my favorite film of 2026. Two guys in Toronto who have a band called Nirvanna the Band are trying to get a show at a club where you can probably get a show with a phone call and in the process accidentally time travel back to 2008. Much of the film takes places on the streets of Toronto with people who clearly have no idea what's going on. They don't appear to have permits or permission of any kind and the whole thing is kind of bonkers. It's also really, really funny and has 5 or 6 "wait, how did they do that?" moments.
It's an extension of a show (Nirvanna the Band the Show, obviously) but you don't need to see any of it going in (I hadn't).
It's streaming on Hulu.
The show is also a lot of fun. Also on Hulu.
That's it. Midnight Madness is next week!
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