Where Sports Meets Politics: Mike Shepherd Joins the Podcast

The 2026-27 season is already underway — Easton and Fort Fairfield kicked things off up in Aroostook County this week, continuing a tradition that dates back generations, when the County's harvest schedule forced an early start so student-athletes could help bring in the potato crop before falling behind on games. The rest of the state follows suit in earnest on September 3rd, and schedules are already live on the site (though a few programs — looking at you, John Bapst — still need to get their full slate into the MPA system).

But this episode isn't really about the season opener. It's about something Maine Basketball Rankings doesn't usually wade into: politics.

The Backstory

After a Facebook post about the ICE situation in Biddeford drew some heated pushback — including the now-familiar "shut up and dribble" refrain — it seemed like the right moment to bring on someone who thinks about the intersection of sports and civic life for a living: Mike Shepherd, Politics and Investigations Editor at the Bangor Daily News and the 2023 Maine Press Association Journalist of the Year.

Shepherd, a Hall-Dale grad who once played basketball there, talked about how he nearly went the sports-journalism route before getting pulled into politics during the 2010 gubernatorial cycle — and how a memorable eighth-grade social studies class run by legendary Maine broadcaster Rob Kennedy (complete with a homemade basketball simulation league) helped set him on that path.

How Political Coverage Mirrors Sports Coverage

A big chunk of the conversation focused on how newsrooms decide what to cover — and how that process isn't so different from ranking basketball teams. Shepherd broke down how his desk prioritizes stories: what's genuinely new, what readers care about, and what a paper can add to a story that others haven't already covered. Polls, debates, and fundraising numbers become the "games" of a campaign season, standing in for the box scores and point differentials that drive rankings on this site.

He also touched on some famous Maine polling misses — the 2020 Collins-Gideon Senate race chief among them — and how, just like a team that looks unbeatable in October can fade by February (or vice versa), political predictions carry real uncertainty even with good data.

Graham Platner, Janet Mills, and the Chaos of 2025-26

The conversation dug into last year's Democratic Senate primary chaos — Graham Platner's meteoric and messy rise, Janet Mills' underwhelming campaign launch, and Troy Jackson's surprisingly quick and well-organized consolidation of support heading into what many expected to be a contested convention. Shepherd's read: Jackson's labor-organizing background gave him an edge in exactly the kind of grassroots, delegate-by-delegate organizing that decided the race — a reminder that, in politics as in sports, how a team (or campaign) prepares often predicts how it performs.

Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and the "Halo Effect"

A personal theory got some airtime too: that Susan Collins benefits from an "Olympia Snowe halo effect," with casual observers conflating the two moderate Maine women senators despite very different governing styles and voting records. Shepherd pushed back gently, noting Collins has always been more willing to work inside the system — chairing Appropriations, being the go-to senator when Maine needs something — which puts her in the spotlight (and the crosshairs) far more often than Snowe or Angus King ever were.

Where This Actually Ties Back to Maine Sports

The most relevant part of the conversation, for regular readers of this site, was the discussion of how demographics and local politics directly shape high school athletics in Maine:

• Declining enrollment (Hall-Dale's graduating classes have shrunk significantly since the '90s) is forcing more cooperative teams and conference realignment.
• Rural communities losing schools — like the recent closure in Topsfield — have real consequences for sports participation, not just academics.
• The MPA, while technically a private entity, is functionally a quasi-public organization funded indirectly through the public school system it governs — which means it can't fully separate itself from politics, whether the topic is transgender athlete policy or ICE activity affecting attendance at practice in communities like Portland, Biddeford, and Lewiston.

Shepherd's take: the MPA tends to be conservative in the small-c sense — incremental, consensus-driven, reluctant to set its own agenda — which has helped it avoid the kind of splintering seen with programs like NYA or Hyde, but also means big decisions often get pushed back to individual schools and school boards.

The Pitch: A 16-Team Super Tournament

Buried near the end is a genuinely fun idea worth floating to readers: a postseason "champions tournament" — the 10 regional champs plus 6 at-large teams — played the week after the state tournament wraps up, sponsored by a company like L.L. Bean, with proceeds benefiting booster clubs statewide. Given the five-week gap between winter tournament and spring sports, and the appetite Maine fans have shown for cross-class matchups (see: the Kennebec Summer League), it's hard to argue the demand isn't there.

Full episode available wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks to Mike Shepherd for joining the show.