The former coach at Livermore Falls

and Jay was hired as athletic director at Monmouth.
By Randy Whitehouse
Staff Writer

Mike Burnham and Steve Ouellette once tried to out-coach one another on the baseball diamond. Now they’re working side-by-side as administrators at Monmouth Academy.

Ouellette is replacing Burnham as athletic director and assistant principal at the school, while Burnham takes the title of principal after 12 years in the athletic post.

“We’re very pleased to have him,” Burnham said. “We had a number of quality candidates. The experience Steve brought, not only as an athletic director but as an assistant principal, met the needs of the school nicely.”

Ouellette coached Livermore Falls and Burnham was skipper at Monmouth when the two schools met in the Western C playoffs in 1989. Ouellette’s seventh-ranked Andies won the game, which took place while second-seeded Monmouth was still in the old Mid-Maine Conference.

“He came down and beat us. We’ve talked about that game every once in awhile,” Burnham said.

Ouellette, 45, remembers the game well, and now that he’s back in the Mountain Valley Conference, he’s reliving a lot of memories.

“Thinking about that, you just remember where things have been the last 13 or 14 years,” he said.

Ouellette spent that time as a teacher and coach at Livermore Falls, Jay (his alma mater) and as an administrator at Lawrence. He was assistant principal at Lawrence for several years before adding the title of athletic director last year.

Although he enjoyed working at the Fairfield school, Ouellette said that the daily 60-mile round trip commute and long hours meant he had to spend too much time away from his family, which lives in Winthrop.

He has two daughters, ages 13 and 11, who are in middle school and involved in many different school activities.

“This is an important time in their lives, and I don’t want to miss it. The main reason I took a look at this situation was to get closer to home,” said Ouellette, who is currently splitting time between the two schools as he helps Lawrence find his successor. “When you’re doing a job like that, especially at a Class A school, it demands a lot of time.”

He heads an athletic department at Monmouth that, under Burnham’s watch, has successfully completed the transition from the East-West Conference to the MVC and a move up from Class D back to Class C.

Monmouth has a little more than one-quarter of the enrollment of Lawrence, but with middle school athletics and the high school’s own expanding athletic program factored in (Monmouth is adding golf this fall), Ouellette doesn’t think working at a smaller school will leave him looking for ways to fill his time.

“When this opened up, just knowing the kind of school district Monmouth has and getting to know some of the teachers as I have over the past few years and knowing what a great place to be it is, it was too good of an opportunity to pass up,” he said.

rwhitehouse@sunjournal.com

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