By Randy Whitehouse,Staff Writer

DIXFIELD – Just weeks away from officially going solo as a football program, Dirigo needs to find a new head coach.

Al Cayer, hired just a few months ago to guide the Cougars into their first season of varsity football without Buckfield High School, has resigned.

Cayer, who was an assistant the first year of the Dirigo/Buckfield cooperative team, then became the head coach last year, said his schedule was just too full to devote the time necessary to the budding Dirigo program.

“It’s just a lot of time and I was just spreading myself too thin,” he said.

Cayer coaches track and Nordic skiing at Mountain Valley High School and plans to stay on with those positions. He is also nine credits away from earning his master’s degree in educational leadership and will be attending classes once or twice a week at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham.

In addition, Cayer said he wants to watch his son, Dylan, who he coaches in skiing and track at Mountain Valley, play soccer this fall. Dylan will be a senior in the fall.

“I hate to see him get done,” said Dirigo athletic director Jeff Turnbull.

“He’s a great teacher of the game. He really helped us get started the last couple of years, but I totally understand. We’ll miss him.”

A replacement has not been named yet, Turnbull said. He hopes to have one soon because practices begin in five weeks, Aug. 15.

Whoever succeeds Cayer inherits a program that is certainly in transition, having broken off its two-year relationship with Buckfield.

But they won’t have to start from scratch, either. The Cougars lost only a handful of seniors and Buckfield contributors from last year’s team, which went 1-8, and they’ll return a number of veterans who have won four games over the first two years of varsity football.

“The program’s in pretty good shape,” Cayer said. “We’re in the mid-30s for numbers. We’ve got some boys that it’s going to be their third year of varsity competition, and we’ve got some other kids coming back, too.”

Dirigo opens its season Sept. 2 at Madison.