Week 1 in the books
Is Maranacook this year's team to watch?
Saturday's football schedule was light on surprises, but we still got a couple of notable results. Mainly, a couple of teams that we all thought were pretty good made a statement that they very well might be really good.
Josh Crosby rushed for 204 yards and 4 scores on only 10 carries as Maranacook set an early high water mark for scoring with a 60-14 win over Traip. Maranacook spent last season in 11-man, losing to Bapst in the second round after going 2-6 in the regular season, but there's a lot of early buzz on them in 8-man. Could they make a run at OOB's dominance in 8-Man Small South? The Gulls blew out Sacopee Valley on the road to remind everyone that they aren't going anywhere. They'll play on October 17th at the Beach.
Mike Mandell of Varsity Maine and I discussed Maranacook's impressive win and a whole lot more on this week's overreactions podcast. If you haven't watched an overreactions podcast yet, the premise is simple: each week during football season a Maine media person joins me to go class-by-class around the state and overreact to that week's results.
Week 1 features all that, plus Mike talks about the bumper crop of young quarterbacks in the Central Maine region and we hit on a little bit of a basketball preview.
One of the bigger stories from last fall was Dexter's campaign to add lights to their football field. And while they didn't win the T-Mobile competition, they did reach their ultimate goal of adding lights and Friday was the debut of their Friday Night Lights.
Stuart Hedstrom
One of the most popular basketball features is now available (and live) for fall sports.
Tourney Odds used a Monte Carlo simulation to play out the rest of the season 10,000 times. The short version is it uses a random number generator to simulate games and the 10K simulations are essentially looking for combinations like a 1 seed losing 5 straight or a winless team pulling off a big upset.
The volume of those simulations creates a bell curve for each team. Kennebunk, for example, goes undefeated in 3.6% of simulations, 7-1 in 17.1%, and so on. It looks like they're a lock to make the playoffs at 4-4 (or 3-5 with a tiny bit of help).
You can then see the larger B South. Six of the 7 teams get in, so that's not compelling, but seeding certainly is. As games go final, these ranges will get tighter and tighter.
I will add the caveat that this is the first time I've run this for football and Crabtree. It should handle it fine, but you never know.
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Ashland coach Peter Belskis notched his 500th soccer victory on Monday.
Elsewhere
Hailey Plant scored twice and added an assist in Presque Isle's win over Orono...Adriana Lombardi had 4 goals in Winslow's win over Morse...Parker Richardson scored his second goal in the final minutes to give Lake Region a win over Poland...Lexi Sweeney's 3 goals and 2 dimes (do they call assists "dimes" in soccer?) paced OOB by Sacopee Valley.
On Saturday, I tested the scoring app with a field hockey game. I've been working on this all summer, but it's always good to test on a real game. It went well!
You can score any game, either via the app that's in beta testing or by clicking the "Score this Game Live" button in the Scoreboard.
You'll want to load in the rosters ahead of time. Once you've scored the game, it'll generate a game report that's useful for sending to the newspaper or parents.
Plus, it'll give you a live view for people who can't make the game and generate a box score.
It's free to score a game.
As data nerd who ran cross-country in high school (to get in shape for basketball season, naturally), there's a new website that absolutely grabbed my attention. And not because I've known the guy who made it since we were kids.
The Maine XC Index aims to bring a degree of mathematical clarity to running through the woods. It's fascinating stuff and even with a smallish sample size, it's doing impressive things.
Trained on September 2025 and asked to predict the Festival of Champions, this model called 92.1% of 444,627 head-to-head matchups across the boys and girls races, and 17 of its 20 predicted top-ten places finished in the top ten. Error is far tighter at the front of the field than at the back: the leaders were predicted to within 8 to 17 seconds, the back of the field to within 55 to 75.
There's a lot of stuff here.
Each runner has a profile. Here's Maranacook's Gage Mattson.
You can compare runners and do a whole lot more.
Check it out!
You don't need a fancy spreadsheet to tell you that Camden's soccer team heading up to Don Roux Field in Lewiston has Game of the Day potential.
The early book on A North is that Camden and Lewiston should be fighting for the top seed along with Brunswick.
After that, there's a bit of a gap, so the winner today will have an early leg up and a quality win that'll provide Heal Points all season long.
They'll play again on October 1st and then maybe a third time when the temps turn colder?
The rest of the Model's picks for today's games are after the jump.