More and more schools are choosing to install lights and move their football games to Friday nights.
By Randy Whitehouse
Staff Writer

It’s a Saturday afternoon. All the leaves are raked. The lawnmower and the grill have been put away for the winter. Seems like a good time to check out a high school football game.

Chances are, if you had the sudden urge to go to a game some Saturday afternoon this season, the pickings have been pretty slim.

And they’ll probably get even slimmer in the next few years as more and more schools install lights and move their home games to Friday nights.

Lisbon and Oak Hill, two of the dwindling pool of Saturday holdouts, are exploring the possibility of adding lights. This after Campbell Conference rivals Winthrop, Old Orchard Beach and Boothbay joined the nocturnal trend in the last four years.

There are a lot of reasons schools are turning away from the sun and toward artificial lighting. First and foremost is attendance increases dramatically for Friday night games.

“(Football) was always a community activity here, but there’s a lot less going on Friday night than Saturday afternoon,” Winthrop athletic director Jeff DeBlois said.

Though he hasn’t kept attendance figures, DeBlois said there have been a lot more people going to games since Winthrop started playing regularly on Friday nights in 2001.

Attendance at Winthrop games has dipped a little this season because the Ramblers are 1-6 and have been playing in some nasty weather, DeBlois said, “but even with our attendance being down on Friday night, it’s still about even with our better Saturday games.”

Since his team plays Saturday afternoon home games, Oak Hill coach Bruce Nicholas gets to weigh the advantages and disadvantages to both. While there are some things he likes about Saturday games, such as his team’s traditional Saturday morning breakfasts, he’s seen up close how Friday night crowds differ from Saturday crowds.

“You get more of the student body there and you get a heck of a lot more of the younger kids,” said Nicholas, who said he would like to see Oak Hill add lights.

There’s more for those kids to do on Saturday, and the players and the coaches wouldn’t mind having their weekends free to do those things, too.

“A lot of them work on Saturdays, or they hunt or they go to the Litchfield Fair,” Nicholas said.

Playing Friday nights holds more tangible advantages, he added. Most noticeably, the weather is cooler. Football players don’t necessarily beat the heat when the calendar turns to autumn. Nicholas’ best example came two weeks ago when the Raiders played at Mount Desert Island.

“That Saturday afternoon was hot. I had kids that were nauseous and bending over,” Nicholas said. “and this is in the middle of October.”

The heat isn’t the only concern in the middle of October. So is the amount of daylight schools without the wattage have on their side when scheduling practices and games.

Schools with lights can stretch their practice and game schedules past sunset and play important games at times that are more convenient for everyone, including other fall sports besides football. For example, Winthrop girls’ soccer will host a playoff contest against Mt. Abram today that starts at 3:30 p.m. and ends under the lights, a luxury it didn’t have before the bulbs.

“(Without the lights), we’d have normally started much earlier than that,” DeBlois said. “Mt. Abram would have had to leave (for Winthrop) a lot earlier and probably miss a whole school day to get down here.”

At Lisbon, co-curricular director Jeff Ramich has set up a committee to discuss lights and other improvements such as new locker rooms and concession stands and an all-weather track at Thompson Field. Installation of the lights could cost between $80,000 and $85,000, none of which would come out of the school budget but rather through fundraising and volunteer help. The hope is that adding the lights will open the door for other improvements and ultimately help Lisbon attract events that will bring prestige to its other programs.

“Maybe we can even host an MVC (track) meet or a field hockey tournament,” Ramich said.

While Friday night football boasts an overwhelming number of supporters among players, coaches, fans and administrators, there are still some traditionalists who prefer their pigskin on Saturday afternoon, including Winthrop coach Chris Kempton.

Kempton coached the Ramblers in the mid-90s before the school added lights and was an assistant at Colby College, where Saturday football is a tradition, before returning to Winthrop this year to coach under the lights.

“I always grew up playing on Saturday afternoon,” said Kempton. “Personally, I enjoyed playing Saturday afternoon football better than I did Friday night football.”

“The atmosphere is different,” he added. “Friday night is great; you’re the only show in town and playing under the lights is wonderful. But there’s something special about getting up Saturday morning and eating breakfast and heading down to play a game of football in the afternoon.”