Spring may seem light years away right now, but to Don King, it is approaching with the velocity of a high fastball.

Once the days started getting longer in December, finding a new varsity baseball coach for the upcoming season wasn’t going anywhere, so King figured it was time to take matters into his own hands, literally, and make himself a candidate for the job.

The Poland Regional High School committee last week approved the former Lewiston baseball coach to replace Dave Jordan, who stepped down in August to become an assistant coach at Bates.

“I’m excited about the team. There are some great kids in the program,” King said. “We had a lot of young kids playing last year and a lot of them are coming back this year. We’ve got a ton of arms that are coming back.”

King coached varsity baseball at Lewiston for nine years before stepping down in 2005 to become Poland’s co-curricular director.

He said he didn’t intend to seek the job when Jordan resigned. Poland started advertising for the position in newspapers and an online education employment site shortly after Jordan resigned in August, King said, and got the word out through the state’s baseball community.

“I would say that we had low-moderate response. There weren’t very many people that responded,” King said. “I know the word was out, because people as far away as Wells would ask me questions about it.”

“I made a decision, probably some time in December, that I would throw my name in the hat and so I passed the process along,” he said.

Poland closed the application period on Jan. 5, and PRHS principal Cari Medd took over the interview and hiring process.

“The pool was very small and Don was the only candidate with any high school experience, so I did not do any other interviews,” Medd said in an e-mail to the Sun Journal.

It is rare, but not unheard of, for athletic administrators to also coach at the Class B level. Susan Robbins, King’s predecessor as co-curricular director, also coached varsity field hockey and varsity softball. Craig Sickels, Freeport’s athletic director and varsity boys’ basketball coach and a former coach at Buckfield, is stepping down as coach at the end of this season but will remain on as AD.

King said the lighter schedule for spring athletics makes doing both jobs possible.

“I know that I would not even consider coaching in the fall. That would be out of the question because there are just way too many things going on,” he said. “We’ve got baseball, softball and track in the spring. It also helps to have some folks around that know how things work. We have a ‘game coverage’ position in our school, so as long as things are set up properly, that should help out quite a bit.”

Dave Sawyer, Poland’s JV coach last year, is the only member of King’s coaching staff for now. King is now searching for a new JV coach.

Poland’s baseball program blossomed under Jordan, who posted a 54-17 record in four years that included a Western Maine Conference championship in 2007, three tournament berths and two appearances in the Western Class B finals.

The Knights graduated nine seniors and finished 8-8 last year, narrowly missing the Western B playoffs.