AUBURN – He doesn’t have a gray beard or frown lines on his forehead, but if there is a grizzled veteran in high school basketball, St. Dom’s Ian Pullen is it.

Pullen, a four-year starter for the Saints, has seen pretty much everything. He remembers practices in the old school’s auditorium with asbestos coming off the walls, portable baskets that were 9 1/2 feet high, “home” games at Central Maine Community College (then CMTC), and long bus rides home after blowout losses.

“It wasn’t a lost cause, but going into different games it was like ‘I’m going to bust my butt and 99.9 percent of the time we’re going to lose,'” Pullen said. “It was tough going through that (freshman) year.”

Pullen has been there for the low-point and the renaissance of the Saints’ basketball program. He’s seen it go from 1-18 his freshman year to 3-15 as a sophomore, from 12-5 and hosting a playoff game last year to being considered one of the top contenders in Class C this year.

The growth and change he’s seen in little over three years hasn’t gone unnoticed by Pullen. Things started looking up his sophomore year when the new school in Auburn opened, with a beautiful new gym. Then Dan DeBruin and Mike Gray took over as co-coaches, giving the program a direction and stability it had lacked in several years.

“The last couple, three years have been great, working with them,” Pullen said. “You know the program. You know what to expect and what they want from you.”

It wasn’t long before DeBruin and Gray learned what they could expect from Pullen – unmatched work ethic and intensity, and a keen basketball sense, in other words, a prototypical point guard.

“He’s the hardest worker that I’ve ever coached,” said DeBruin.

“There are times where, if we didn’t have a point guard like Ian out there, we’d get real worried if one or two things went wrong,” said Gray. “We know if he’s out there, he’s going to either make up for it himself or make sure his teammates are right where they need to be and doing exactly what they need to do.”

“Having him out there, it makes our job a lot easier,” Gray added. “He sets the tone for everybody else with the intensity level and the skill level and knowing what to do and how to get his point across.”

Pullen usually gets his point across by patiently running the Saints’ offense. That used to mean dumping the ball into his teammate, Mike Albert, the team’s leading scorer the last two years. Now, with Albert graduated, it means looking for his own offense.

“The difference is now that he’s finding those times when it’s right for him to call his own number,” DeBruin said. “In the past, he was very hesitant to do that, and now he knows that’s what the team needs. His aggressive approach is helping our offense. He’s opened up lanes for others by doing that.”

Pullen just sees this as another step in the team’s evolution, which he hopes leads to the Saints’ first trip to Augusta since 1999.

“This year’s team and last year’s team are definitely totally different teams,” said Pullen, who is leaning towards attending Div. III Wheaton College in Chicago next fall, where he hopes to make the basketball team as a walk-on. “Obviously Mike Albert was the focus last year and we kind of fed off of him. This year’s team, I think everybody can fill a role, which is nice because we can do more. We have more options.”

“I think this team is one of the best teams we’ve ever had, or at least I’ve ever had,” he said. “I don’t want to look back on this season and think about what we could have done.”

That’s not too much for a grizzled vet to ask.

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