Along those same lines, high school football is an inexact science for any coaching staff. They’re working with growing, vulnerable bodies, sometimes fragile psyches, and distractions that often begin far away from the field.

Now try blending in two dozen players from the town next door, none of whom have ever played the game at the varsity level. Having all those reinforcements can be both a blessing and a curse. If the Winthrop/Monmouth cooperative locker room were a laboratory, the combined ingredients could have blown up in either the good sense of the word or the bad one.

Fortunately for the Ramblers — a name that honors the 90-year-old half of the program — their maiden voyage as a blended family has been all good. Beating Sacopee Valley by forfeit a week ago left Winthrop/Monmouth as the lone undefeated team in Western Class D at 6-0.

Wins over Boothbay tonight and Maranacook next week would clinch the No. 1 seed in the Campbell Conference playoffs. Going it alone as an injury-riddled shadow of its former self, Winthrop hadn’t qualified for the postseason at all the past two years.

“Everybody came into this program ready to take off full speed,” tailback Zach Glazier said. “Everybody wanted to see what we had. Now that we’re winning games, in a season where you’re winning, it’s so much easier to work hard.”

Pooling programs has met with mixed results in recent years.

The standard-bearer in the category, of course, is Mountain Valley. The outfit resulting from the combination of Rumford and Mexico reached the regional final in 17 of its first 23 seasons, winning four Class B championships. More recently, Spruce Mountain has emerged from the bitter, generations-old rivalry between Jay and Livermore Falls, finally turning a corner in this, its third season.

Winthrop and Monmouth didn’t have to deal with such hurt feelings. They hadn’t met on a football field in a meaningful capacity in any of the current players’ lifetime.

“I don’t remember it, but apparently when we were in middle school we played them once in a scrimmage,” said Cole Arsenault, a starting lineman who attends Monmouth. “It’s been a while.”

The schools’ rivalry, if it exists, has been carved out on the baseball diamond and basketball court.

“We haven’t really talked about other sports that much. We’ve talked mostly about football. I mean, it is football season,” receiver Drew Stratton of Winthrop said. “It went great from the beginning. I didn’t have any problems with anyone. There was no tension, really, when anybody showed up.”

Monmouth dropped its football program in the 1970s before reviving it at the youth level about 10 years ago. While the Ramblers were winning their most recent Western Class C title in 2008, seven miles away the Mustangs were rolling up wins against junior varsity and development squads.

With each school’s enrollment numbers leveling off at around 220 students and the Maine Principals’ Association preparing to add a fourth enrollment classification to football this fall, the long-rumored merger made sense. Both school boards approved the joint program in March.

“It’s a lot more competitive,” wide receiver and defensive back Brandon Goff of Monmouth said. “We’re not blowing people out by 30 or 40 points. There’s a lot more skill, a lot harder hits. A lot more intensity in the games, too.”

The team’s colors and nickname were left up to the players, who paid homage to Winthrop’s tradition by sticking with the familiar Ramblers label and green uniform tops. The logo has been modified to interlock an ‘M’ with the existing ‘W.’

“It was very evident that no one cared what we were called. The kids from Winthrop just wanted to play football and be competitive again, and the kids from Monmouth just wanted to play varsity,” Winthrop/Monmouth coach Joel Stoneton said. “I guess from a political or a social point of view, you could not have hand-picked a better group of kids (for it). They’re great football players, but they’re even better people. I look like an all-star because of how they get along.”

The value of Monmouth’s addition has manifested itself in games. Goff made a game-changing grab late in the first half of a win over Dirigo. Jake Weeks stepped in for an injured Glazier and helped the Ramblers rally past Oak Hill a week later.

It has been even more evident Monday through Thursday.

“It’s like a totally different practice when you have enough guys to go against varsity level players,” Glazier said. “You actually get more of a game-like scenario out of practice.”

Other cooperative teams, football and otherwise, have been foiled by excessive concern over who receives playing time and credit for wins.

Stoneton helped eliminate that by enlisting captains from both schools. That discussion was the last time anyone on the team was allowed to use the names Winthrop and Monmouth separately.

“There was some unrest at first when the depth charts came out, but kids policed that on their own,” Stoneton said.

Just the way the experiment was drawn up.

koakes@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link