Mountain Valley hopes to build off of last season’s success.
By Randy Whitehouse
Staff Writer

RUMFORD – If only basketball were as simple as picking up where you left off last year. The Mountain Valley Falcons would only have to do a little fine tuning here and there and they’d be well on their way to the school’s third state championship.

Basketball isn’t that simple. If the Falcons didn’t already know this, they’ve heeded the warning from their coach, Ryan Casey.

“Everything starts over again,” junior center Jarod Oldham said. “We have to work hard again to get back to where we were.”

Where they were was within a game of the Class B championship last March. The fourth seed in the West, Mountain Valley shocked perennial powers Gorham and Greely before losing to Winslow in the title game.

With their entire frontcourt in tact, consisting of the high-post, low-post tandem of 6-5 Issac Stickney and the 6-6 Oldham, and the clutch shooting of Zach Fergola, along with an array of supporters both big (6-4 senior forward Matt McCann) and small (5-10 sophomore point guard Jeremy Childs), Mountain Valley fans are pushing the dancing sugar plums out of their dreams in favor of golden trophies.

The players see the possibilities, too.

“I think we might have more depth this year than we did last year,” Fergola said. “If we come together and play as one, we can do anything.”

But a return to the school’s hardwood glory days, last seen in these parts in the early 1990s, isn’t just a few months away.

The Falcons know they have eighteen nights of bruising Mountain Valley Conference basketball and countless more days and nights of intense practices to sweat through before they can even picture themselves winning games in the Augusta Civic Center in February and March.

“The biggest game for us is (tonight’s season-opener with) Boothbay,” Casey said. “We see ourselves as a talented young group, but we certainly can’t look past anybody.”

“We’ve just got to get better every day and work together,” McCann said. “Hopefully, by the end of the year we get to the point where we do what we did last year.”

Mountain Valley has the talent to get to that point, but getting to that point also requires some intangibles. The backcourt of Craig Milledge and Kevin Gallant, which Casey calls the heart and the brains of last year’s team, has moved on (although Milledge is tutoring Childs on playing the point).

Replacing the leadership the Falcons enjoyed from their backcourt will be difficult. Casey credits Fergola with taking a more active and vocal role on the team, even though he’s a junior.

“Anybody can step up and be a leader. It doesn’t really matter who it is,” Fergola said.

The Falcons won’t discriminate for leadership or opponents this year, even though they are the lone Class B team in the MVC this year. They’ll need every win they can get this year, because beating Class C teams isn’t exactly a gold mine in the Heal Points system.

“We could go undefeated and I don’t think we’d be the top seed (in Class B) either way,” Stickney said.

Opponents, meanwhile, will look at the Falcons and see an opportunity to hit the jackpot.

“I don’t know that (being the only Class B team) makes that much difference for us except that it sets us up to play more teams that see us as being worth a lot of (Heal) points,” Casey said.

They’ll be worth a lot more than points to their opponents. A win over the Falcons will give any of their rivals in the MVC a supreme boost of confidence. That comes with the territory when you’ve got “Mountain Valley” on your jersey and when the expectations that come with that name have been resurrected.

“We try not to think about (the expectations), ” Oldham said. “We try to let that go and just play our game every game this season.”

At Mountain Valley, every game starts tonight.

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