Players from Dirigo and Buckfield high schools are determined to make this team work.
By Randy Whitehouse
Staff Writer

DIXFIELD – Michael Walsh has been waiting a long time to watch football here. He decided he wasn’t going to wait any longer.

Walsh and several other fans were present to witness the birth of Maine’s latest varsity football program when the new Buckfield/Dirigo squad started practicing last week. He’s attended every practice since.

“This is great,” said Walsh as he watched his son, Scott, a Dirigo sophomore, practice with the JVs on an unmarked field next to the tennis courts behind Dirigo High School.

“I’ve been waiting 14 years for it.”

That was the last time Dirigo had a varsity football team. Buckfield, its new partner, has never had one, though it has had a middle school team for some time and fielded a JV team the last three years.

Forty-five prospective players, and many of their families, turned out on the first day of practice last week in Canton. The team plans to alternate practices weekly in Dixfield and Buckfield, but met halfway for the first week of workouts.

“The first week, we had a lot of parents from each of the towns,” said Deb Wetherell, whose husband, Jim, is the varsity head coach. “Everyone got along so well because we’re so excited about having a team here.”

Getting to know you

It’s hard enough starting a new varsity team when everyone knows each other. But these players and coaches have to spend the preseason learning each other’s names, in addition to finding out about one another’s strengths, weaknesses and tendencies on the football field.

Fortunately, the players seem to have immediately hit it off. They aren’t breaking up into groups from Buckfield or Dirigo on the sidelines or between plays.

“We got along good from the beginning,” said Scott Wetherell, Jim and Deb’s son and a senior tailback from Buckfield. “It hasn’t been as tough as I thought it would be.”

“There’s no more Buckfied, no more Dirigo,” said Jim Wetherell, who was an assistant for two years for the Buckfield JV team. “Every now and then we’ll do our running drills and we’ll say “linemen go, backs go.” Then we’ll say “Drigo go” and if anybody runs…”

Running on “Dirigo” or “Buckfield” usually results in 10 pushups by those who jump the gun. Players have been doing a lot of pushups the last two weeks for other minor transgressions while they figure out what Wetherell and his coaching staff expect of them.

The coaches also have the difficult task of learning what they can expect from their players, particularly the ones from Dirigo, many of whom haven’t played organized football in years. Most of the Buckfield players have had three years to prepare for their varsity debut.

While some of the Dirigo players have had to play catch-up, Jim Wetherell said: “There are some Dirigo kids that are right there with the Buckfield kids. There are some super athletes, so they’re picking it up real fast.”

Politics and football

There’s a lot more to football than learning the plays, as the players and coaches are finding out.

“There’s a rule where we’ve got to provide a tape of our last game to the next team we play,” Scott Wetherell said. “We didn’t know about that until two days ago, so now we’re scrambling to find a spot to tape. It’s all new.”

“There’s an awful lot to it,” said Jim Wetherell. “The big thing for me is my wife helps a lot. She does the paperwork, she makes sure the grades are there. That helps me out and lets me be a coach. I don’t want the politics.”

It’s tough to avoid the politics, though, as Wetherell is learning. While they settled on the team colors easily (gray and maroon at home, white and blue on the road), naming the team could be a touchy subject, lest one of the schools feel left out.

The players thought they had settled on the Buckfield Cougars, attaching the Dirigo nickname to the town where half of the team’s home games will be played.

“The kids like it, but we’ve got some people that don’t want it, so I’ve got to have them come up with another one,” Jim Wetherell said. “I don’t care. I just want to play ball.”

The team, whatever it decides to call itself, will play in the Class C Campbell Conference, against the likes of Jay, Winthrop, Boothbay, Livermore Falls, Lisbon, Madison, Old Orchard Beach and another new addition, Cape Elizabeth. It’s a bruising, rough and tumble league, one which takes its football seriously, but the players are ready to dish out as much punishment as they take.

“All of our running backs are almost or over 200 pounds,” said Craig Langervin, a senior fullback from Dirigo who will join Wetherell and Brandon Berry in the starting backfield. “We’ve got a lot of kids that can hit hard, too.”

They’ve already played, and played well, in a scrimmage against a fledgling junior varsity team at Gray-New Gloucester. This week they’ll play at a round-robin that includes other Class C teams such as Dexter as they prepare for their Sept. 6 opener against Jay at Dirigo High School.

Dirigo/Buckfield is scheduled to split its four home games evenly between the high school field in Dixfield and a field behind the town office in Buckfield, though the latter facility is going to have to have to be upgraded before it can be used for games.

Every other team in the state has one home field to play on, but these players think they can make the most of having two homes.

“It’s not that tough, really,” said freshman quarterback Jamie Henderson, who is from Buckfield. “Home field is home field. We’ve got our own fans behind us.”

“I think once we have our first home game here, everyone will realize it’s back and it’s time to get back into football,” Berry said.

rwhitehouse@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link