Your average senior in high school does a lot of growing up this time of year.

Your average senior athlete is fortunate if they escape these next two months with all of their limbs still attached.

It’s a busy, nervous time of the year for all seniors. Time to start worrying about proms, graduation tickets and summer or post-graduation employment. Time to choose a college now that all of the acceptance letters are in or a new path in life now that all of the rejection letters have been burned.

Throw athletics into the mix and the experience can be hectic. At no other time of the year do athletes have to deal with more scheduling problems than in the spring. Athletic directors and coaches usually try to work practices and games around those conflicts, but it’s such a short season and so many other things are going on in and out of school, conflicts are bound to arise.

Most senior athletes will be going on to college, and a large number of them will continue playing at least one sport in college. Some are facing the grim reality that their athletic lives will soon consist of golf, bowling and slow-pitch softball leagues. Regardless of what the future holds, many scholar-athletes feel obligated to make the most out of their last few weeks of high school competition.

For this reason, and for the experience that seniors bring to a team, coaches are usually pretty excited to have a roster full of seniors in the spring.

Oak Hill’s baseball team is blessed with 11 seniors on their roster this year and are favored to defend their Class B state title due largely to their presence and their, well, seniority.

But Raider coach Bill Fairchild doesn’t feel blessed.

“They’re going to be tugged at from all different kinds of directions to do all kinds of different things, and some of those things (the players) are going to say Well, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing’ and they’re commitment to their team now becomes secondary.”

“I don’t want to get up here and editorialize,” he added, “but that’s like life today. Life today is you make a commitment to something only until something else comes along that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

On Wednesday, Fairchild sat and had a brief chat with one of his seniors, Pat Duchette about commitment and “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities. Duchette had just come back from the Maine Economics Challenge. He and teammates Jason Guerette and Kyle Harrington were among those selected to compete on one of two teams representing Oak Hill at the state competition.

“It’s just another thing that we got pulled into,” Duchette said. “It seems like we’re always getting pulled into activities like that.”

And what do you know? Oak Hill finished 1-2 at the challenge, earning a spot in the East Regional in Baltimore April 26. Of course, the Raiders have a game that day, at Rockland.

Duchette has an unenviable decision to make. Here he’s made two commitments, bound to both by school pride and his own competitive nature, with coaches and teachers that he respects both wondering where his loyalties rest.

“We’ll deal with that when we have to,” an exasperated Duchette said.

Duchette’s future doesn’t ride on his decision. He’s already been accepted to Bowdoin, where he hopes to continue his baseball career. Thankfully, building his resume for college is no longer part of the process.

But it’s a difficult decision nonetheless.

High school seniors are facing a lot of those decisions this spring, decisions that will cause them a few headaches and cost them a couple of hours sleep and not much else.

But some will also face decisions that will cause them regular trips to the medicine cabinet and a lot of tossing and turning because what they decide now could impact their lives long after they’ve picked up their sheepskins in June.

Think about it the next time you’re at a game or a meet and a senior makes an error or gets disqualified for a false start.

Consider everything that must be going through their minds and who’s pulling them in what direction.
Randy Whitehouse is a staff writer. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]