Their Job is Beach
Fueled by pier fries, OOB pulls off a mild upset to extend their winning streak
The Old Orchard Beach football team has been the defining team of the 8-man era in Maine, dominating teams left and right and taking a Gold Ball back to the pier every other year. They'd won 29 consecutive regular season games entering last night's 150 mile road trip to Old Town to take on a team that won their first 3 games after dropping down from 11-man.
When you win 29 games in a row, you become accustomed to certain things. Like, for example, being favored to win. So I certainly heard about it when the Model listed the Gulls as 3 and a half point underdogs on the road and I'm guessing they noticed when a third of Varsity Maine's panel picked against them.
The experts were looking pretty good when Old Town's Charlie DeGrasse opened the scoring from 8 yards out, but they couldn't convert the 2-point try and things went poorly from there. OOB tied it with Daniel Cashman's first score, grabbed an interception to snuff out an Old Town drive at the end of the half, then followed it up with a 81 yards, nearly 10 minute drive capped by a Cashman reception from Matthew Charron to take the lead. Ethan Closson answered, but OOB put together another long drive and the Gulls outlasted the Coyotes 22-12 to extend their winning streak to 30 games.
After the game, I heard from OOB defensive coordinator (and podcast guest) Jason Webber, who joked the Model should include a "Webber defense factor".
Listen, it’s all about the kids. We can prepare them and get them ready, but tonight, they execute at a high level! These were two great teams. But don’t bet against us!
OOB will likely not be tested again until they host Maranacook in week 7. Old Town could be in good shape until they host Ellsworth to end the year (and probably decide the 1 seed.
Rivals is offering a new, uh, thing where you can "get evaluated by a Rivals Scout" for the low, low cost of $499.
The claim from Rivals is: "Traditionally, national recruiting services have concentrated their resources primarily on prospects projected to play at the highest levels of college football. That represents only a small fraction of the total high school athlete population." 🙄🙄🙄
Kevin Harrish
I call this a tax on your dreams.
The indie film world is littered with these scams–The Black List and nearly all film festivals work on this same model. It's a simple proposition: people are convinced that they have the talent to make it big. The only problem is the people who can make their dreams a reality just haven't had a chance to see it yet and services like Rivals and the Black List promise that access to a lottery ticket. There's a hundred stories of discovery to seemingly validate this. Kevin Smith at Sundance. Lana Turner at a malt shop. Kurt Warner. Linsanity. Sure, there's an element of luck to it, but there's also an abundance of talent (ok, maybe not with Kevin Smith).
In film and music, it's easier to slip through the cracks. There's plenty of talented artists and musicians and actors you've never heard of. It's all opinion, to some degree. But in sports? If you're good enough to play at the next level, they'll find you.
College summer camps, summer combines/camps, increased unofficial visits, larger game day visits, easy access to putting your film online (HUDL). Most kids that aren’t being recruited by the schools they want to be isn’t a visibility issue; it’s a talent issue.
They're just trying to make money off your kid's dreams. They aren't going to do anything for you. Vonnegut said it best.
From the file of "things I saw in my Facebook feed" and not to call out any school in particular, but I imagine we'll see more of this and sooner rather than later.
People are understandably not thrilled about AI. Can you blame them?
There's a million of these AI flyers for sporting events, especially high school events, and they all look the same and they all look terrible.
It's similar to stalling at the end of a tournament game. It doesn't seem so bad if you just go to your team's games and a maybe a couple more and it happens once or twice. But when you watch it once or twice (or three times!) a day for a week and a half it makes you want to scream. I'm guessing you've at least gained an awareness of how blah these are. Now imagine you follow every high school in the state and Facebook's algorithm thinks that means you want to follow a ton of high schools in other states. It's gross.
On the other hand, ADs have a lot more to do than they used to and updating parents and members of the community on social media has climbed pretty high on the list. And these are not graphic designers, so the instinct to pick an easy tool is an understandable one.
But again, people have a lot of reasons to not like it, so kudos to Oceanside AD Troy Smith for being pro-active in trying to find a good solution.
There's a couple of Athletic Directors doing good, non-AI work in this space. David Utterback at Brewer comes to mind.
Anyway, you don't need the AI flyers! They look like trash and people don't like them.
Speaking of "maybe all this technology should just be thrown into the ocean", this blog post hit me kind of hard.
I don't know anyone who's getting anything out of the social sites they frequent anymore. People who used to love seeing what their friends are up to just complain about how they're not seeing them. People who use social to hype their work now mostly talk about how much extra work it's become. And people who've used the sites to build followings are watching their engagement plummet, undone by an algorithm that grows ever more fickle.
When I started doing this, I used social media heavily (mostly Twitter) to get eyeballs and that was effective, but Twitter is essentially dead after Elon bought it and ran it into the ground. MySpace is gone (RIP). Facebook is a cesspool. You get the idea.
The longer I do this, the more I value the things I do outside of social media like this newsletter and the podcast. I make a lot of effort to get to games because there's nothing like the in-person interactions, be it on a sideline or sitting on a bleacher or leaning against a fence.
It's long past the time to start building things that can survive without an algorithm built in Silicon Valley (that was made even more apparent when Facebook decided to cut off links this week in some weird money grab).
Now more than ever—as social falls apart and AI companies compete to replace us—it's important to start figuring out what makes us actually human, what makes our hearts beat and our blood pump and how we can connect with each other in ways that feel real and fill us up instead of drain us completely.
First off, there's a really, really good field hockey game on the schedule. #1 Biddeford heads to #2 Cheverus to see if they can snap the Stags' winning streak.
But we'll stick with football.
You already know about Yarmouth, who put up 82 points last week in a come-from-behind win over Cape Elizabeth last week. This week, Iggy McGrath and the Clippers put their high-flying offense up against Wyl Renwick and an equally potent Ellsworth team.
These teams are scoring a combined 108/points a game, so the consensus over/under is rather high. What's interesting is the Model has this as the Game of the Day, despite favoring Yarmouth by quite a lot. But I guess that goes toward just how prolific these offenses are.
The rest of the Model's picks for today's games are after the jump.