A secret weapon for the Central Maine Community College women’s basketball team’s national championship last year might have been … a bunch of guys.

The Mustangs have been practicing against a group of male students for three seasons, but it became more consistent last year.

“If we didn’t practice against the baseball team last year, we probably would not have won nationals,” CMCC sophomore Eraleena Gethers-Hairston said. “They played a huge role.”

CMCC coach Andrew Morong said that there were five or six male practice players in 2016-17. This year there are even more, usually eight to 10, and all of them are members of the school’s baseball team: Alex Biron, Dakota Chapman, Zack Mann, Jordi Valls, Jordy Cabrera, Eric Hoogterp, Bryce Walker, Angel Ortiz, Damien St. Pierre and Tony Cambria.

“We just basically play defense against them, let them run through their plays,” Walker, who is from Bethel, said. “Then sometimes we’ll play offense, they’ll run their press against us.”

The practice players also serve as a scout team, one that doesn’t already know the Mustangs’ plays, so they can’t cheat.

“Coach always says he wants practice to be harder than any game we play,” Kristen Huntress, a freshman who played at Lake Region, said.

The idea of using men as practice players isn’t new. The Mustangs are following in the footsteps of several NCAA Division I schools.

“UMaine does it, UConn does it, so we can do it, too,” Gethers-Hairston said. “Just because we’re not a D-I school, like, scholarships, stuff like that, doesn’t mean we can’t prepare ourselves for better things.”

Morong said his first two years as a college student were spent at St. John’s University in New York, where he worked in the athletic department and saw men being used as practice players.

Now in his seventh season at CMCC, Morong has implemented the idea, along with a few other big-program concepts to provide a Division I experience.

“It’s like, why can’t we make this as close to a D-I experience as possible?” Morong said. “For some of our girls, this is it, and we want to make this the best experience possible. So we do this, we do mandatory study hall, mandatory strength and conditioning year-round.”

There is little dispute who the better basketball players are.

“(We’re) definitely not better at the sport,” Walker said.

But the men have an athleticism that the women can’t quite match — and, just as important, neither can their opponents.

“I think it definitely makes us better,” Huntress said, “because they’re bigger, faster and stronger than we are, and they’re bigger, faster and stronger than any opponent we’re going to face.”

The practice players are like dumbbells in that their superior athleticism provides a resistance that makes the CMCC players stronger, and it forces them to play sharper.

“It’s made me more physical on the inside,” Gethers-Hairston said. “It made me stronger, and boxing out the right way, because some girls don’t box out, they just kind of stand there.”

Both Gethers-Hairston and Huntress said that facing the men has improved their passing.

“They’re very active, and they’re always moving, and you have to know where they are,” Huntress said. “And just knowing what kind of passes you can make against them because they can cover a lot more ground than girls can, so those skip passes aren’t usually there against them, and it’s good to know that and adapt to what they can do.”

The whole idea is that practicing against the bigger, faster, stronger men makes games easier for the Mustangs. It is especially beneficial against better teams, not only physically, but mentally it takes an edge off and eliminates any intimidation the CMCC players might feel.

“I think it helps our confidence more than anything,” Morong said.

“It does kind of pull us together to make us a lot stronger and be relentless and have a chip on our shoulder,” Gethers-Hairston, and Edward Little graduate, said. “If we can do it to the guys, then we can do it to you, easily.”

‘They want to beat us’

While the Mustangs stretch and warm up, wearing their CMCC-issued practice gear, the practice players are at the other end of the court just shooting and looking like a ragtag group of college kids wearing mismatched shorts and shirts.

They look like they’re ready to play pickup basketball, which, to them, they essentially are.

“I like playing basketball,” Mann said.

Mann played basketball at Gray-New Gloucester through his junior year. Walker played at Telstar. Most, if not all, of the practice players have high school experience.

Morong uses the practice players a few times a week, depending on the Mustangs’ game schedule. He doesn’t spend much time coaching them, in the tactical sense. He might spend four or five minutes going over the basics of a zone CMCC will face in an upcoming game, but the practice players have enough basketball experience among them that they can usually execute the basics.

Morong, though, does have coach-like expectations of them.

“If we don’t aggressively guard them, the coach kind of gets on us,” Mann said.

“Yeah,” Morong said. “I don’t want them to say they’re sorry. I don’t want them to help the girls up or cower to the girls or play against them any differently than they would each other. If they can block the shot, they should get up and block the shot. If can get by their girl and score easy, then that’s what they should do. That’s the only way they’re going to make us better.”

So, the practice players aren’t human versions of cones or chairs that are set up for drills. Their practices with the Mustangs are not walk-throughs. They’re more like scrimmages — physical and competitive scrimmages.

“They play us like anybody else (on their schedule),” Mann said. “The physicality down in the post … they’re not soft.”

“They want to beat us,” Huntress said. “They definitely give it their all when they’re against us, which is what we want.”

The Mustangs and the practice players have played simulated scrimmages, with officials and everything. In one earlier this season, the practice players beat the Mustangs by 10 points.

The women’s team took the L, but they’re continually closing the gap.

“When we first started doing this last year, I don’t think we scored a single basket the first three times we did it,” Morong said. “And then, by the end of the year, we were scoring on them and they weren’t scoring on us.

“Right now, we’re scoring, probably, split 50-50.”

It helps that the Mustangs are closing the athleticism gap. Thanks to an increased dedication to strength and conditioning, they themselves are becoming bigger, faster and stronger.

The practice players benefit, too. Practicing with the Mustangs offers a cardio workout that helps them maintain fitness during the offseason. It’s also rewarding for them to push the women’s team and see them improve.

“You’re helping them out instead of just watching it, so you see the journey, so you see them from now and the playoffs, how good they get,” Mann said.

Morong said that after each session the practice players have participated in this year, they shake his hand and thank him, and high-fived all of the players.

“I just think this is a really cool relationship, where they’re clearly getting a lot out of it, we’re definitely getting a lot of out of it,” Morong said. “So it’s just this really, really neat relationship.”

A group of CMCC men, mostly baseball players, practice against the women’s basketball team.

Copy the Story Link