To a coach, winning a basketball game on the road is akin to Richard Nixon winning a presidential election in Illinois circa 1960.

On the road, it seems like everything’s against you – the crowd, the refs, the dead spots in the floor, even the showers. That’s why coaches and players walk a little taller after a road win. They didn’t just beat their opponent, they beat the odds.

Jason Fuller is proud of his team’s road record during his six-year tenure as Lewiston’s boys varsity coach. He estimates the Blue Devils have won 60-70 percent of their games when their wearing their royal blue away unis.

This year’s team is no different. The players love venturing into hostile territory. The bigger and tougher the crowd, the better.

“That’s usually one of their first questions – “How big is the crowd?” Fuller said.

“The kids feed off it,” he added. “They enjoy getting hassled and heckled a little bit.”

Fuller’s players aren’t masochists. Unfortunately, road games are the only chance the Devils get to experience how great the atmosphere can be at a Maine high school basketball game.

You see, a home game for the Blue Devils has all the atmosphere of a laundromat. Most games, Fuller can look up from his bench and see row upon row of wooden bleachers, from floor to ceiling in the spacious Lewiston High School gym, and see barely enough Lewiston fans to spell out “B-L-U-E D-E-V-I-L-S” on their torsos in blue and white paint.

The fans that do show up get behind their boys and make as much noise as they can, but they’re often matched or even outnumbered by backers of the visiting team. Even if a caravan doesn’t follow the visiting team’s bus to Lewiston, it’s tough for three or four dozen fans spread throughout a cavernous gym, which Fuller estimates holds somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500, to rattle the opposition.

“When you fill it up, it’s a great place to play,” he said. “It’s fun. It’s electrifying.”

Indeed, the gym has seen some electrifying games. Fuller recalls the stands being packed a few years ago when rival Edward Little was in the midst of an undefeated season. Nik Caner-Medley used to draw some pretty good crowds when Deering came to town.

But those kind of crowds seem to be fewer and farther between these days.

Though they’ve been up and down in the standings in recent years, the Devils were ranked No. 4 in the most recent Heal Points. They are an exciting, hard-nosed team that likes to get up and down the floor, the kind of team that would really thrive off the energy of a big home crowd. Yet they’re drawing worse than EL, which was ranked 19th and has less less than half as many wins.

On the one hand, Fuller believes that if he puts a consistent, winning product on the floor year in and year out, the Blue Devils will draw consistently good crowds.

On the other hand, he looks at the Lewiston girls, a perennial contender that is struggling even more to draw a crowd than the boys.

“We’ve got it bad, but they’ve got it worse,” he said. “I feel kind of bad for them because they’ve had great teams the last four or five years.”

It’s not just the basketball teams that are being ignored. The undefeated girls’ swim team and the hockey team, yes, even the hockey team, are winning in virtual silence.

“That’s the frustrating thing,” Fuller said. ” It’s not about wins and losses. It’s giving the kids recognition for what they put in for time and effort.”

Fuller thinks part of the problem is the curse of being a big school. Lewiston has so many teams that the fan base is spread thin. All of the winter sports in Lewiston also have some new competition, the Maineiacs.

But schools outside the metro L-A area don’t have as much competition, and yet they’re fans are disguising themselves as empty bleachers, too.

The one common denominator amongst all these schools, large or small, is the lack of student body representation at the games. Where once the students attending most basketball games could be counted on to fill up one section of the bleachers, if not one side of the gym, teams are now lucky if they fill up a couple of rows.

For whatever reason – Playstation, American Idol, instant messaging – the kids are staying away in droves. Maybe it’s just not cool to be true to your school anymore.

Lewiston administrators are trying to address the problem at their school, Fuller said, and he’s optimistic the school will turn the corner soon and the LHS gym will be rocking again.

In the meantime, I guess the message for his players should be this – it may not seem like it, fellas, but you’re not alone.