Thursday Night Lights
It's Must See Streaming
Here we go.
The first day of Fall Sports is here.
To mark the occasion, I invited Spruce Mountain soccer coach on the podcast. Darren was named the 2023 United Soccer Coaches Small Public Schools National Coach of the Year after he led Mount Abram to their first Gold Ball and an undefeated season. We talked about building a youth program, how a fantasy soccer league can help with player development, and so much more.
In the open, I mention an episode of "Pablo Torre Finds Out" that you really should check out if you like journalistic deep dives that piss off billionaires (who doesn't?). You can find that on YouTube:
Previews!
Michael Hoffer has a bunch of previews over at his new site, like this one for girls soccer. If you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for?
Michael Hoffer
Over on YouTube, Marc Calnan and Eastern Maine Sports previewed the football season.
Varsity Maine has their usual raft of preview articles, including the 30 players in Southern Maine you should keep an eye on.
Steve Craig
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Thursday Night Lights?
Of course, football is traditionally played on Friday Nights, but the ongoing shortage of refs around the state has made it necessary to play some games on Thursday nights, in addition to Saturday. You can think of it as a NFL-type creep if you want. Or, you can sign up to be a ref. They're definitely needed.
This is a problem that isn't going away.
Travis Lazarczyk
The BDN has a great story about players from the old Penquis League who are still getting together to talk about the good old days.
Matt Junker
No one likes NFHS, but we're kind of stuck with them. So if you need to sign up for NFHS, I've got an affiliate link for you. I don't like it any more than you do.
On to the games
I have wrangled the schedules as best I can. Football is in pretty good shape, but field hockey and soccer are a mess, even by the usual low standards. I'm guessing the new MPA website being far-from-complete is a complicating factor. I waited as long as I could to pull the master schedules, but they're still missing a lot. I'll keep at it, but it'll probably be the weekend before I get the Heal Points page up and running as I try to work through some of the more obvious errors. There's teams that have games scheduled in sports they don't offer, for example. There's teams that are missing multiple games. There's matchups I very much doubt are happening. You get the idea.
It's complicating things.
The Model's Picks
Normally this is behind the paywall, but for opening weekend, here's a free preview. Remember: the Model treats this as if nothing has changed from the end of last year, but I'll include the caveat that if, say, a team only has 8 soccer games scheduled for this year, it's going to screw up their data. Still, it'll give you an idea of what it looks like and it's only going to get more accurate as it gets dialed in over the course of the season.
Enjoy!
Football
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Boys Soccer
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Girls Soccer
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Field Hockey
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
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