Dirigo High School Basketball Culture Explained

Community Values Appear Courtside

Dirgo High School, Dixfield, Maine, before a second story was added to the building.

“See that? That’s Carthage chrome,” a student told me.

His classmate had a notebook covered in duct tape, which led to joke. Carthage was one of the towns that sent students to Dirigo High School in Dixfield, Maine. To me, they were all indistinguishable rural Maine communities.

But to lots of Dirigo teens,in the 1990s Carthage served as the object of putdowns, with an occasional jibe about incest tossed in. The chrome line was about the town being so poor that duct tape was a luxury.

With a Maine accent, though, it sounded like “Cahthage chrome.”

Teachers talk about learning from their classes all the time. But I didn’t think I would gain much as Dirigo as students and I grew up in the same state, all liking basketball. They would show me many times how I was wrong.

What I began to recognize too was a bigger lesson that applied to all educational institutions; schools reflect their communities. That means the priorities students and parents have may differ from ones held by teachers.

The assistant principal and athletic director had a clearer view than I did. When we talked about scheduling the two performances of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” he first looked at the large calendar on the wall of his office to make sure they didn’t conflict with any athletic events.

I didn’t see the point. Dirigo had completed an expansion project with a combination cafeteria and auditorium, a cafetorium, we called it, so events could be held there across the hall from the gym. One of the shows did go on the same night as a basketball scrimmage.

But my idea of a scrimmage and a Dirigo High School version were two different things. I stopped by after the play had ended to see the game. It looked like the entire town of Dixfield had assembled on the bleachers. During halftime, nobody moved. Men in the back rows stood up and looked around with their arms folded over their chests. “Brighton Beach Memoirs” had a small crowd of parents and family.

One of the ironies of directing teens in high school plays is that the most talkative, outgoing students can go quiet, barely above a mumble, when they appear on stage. My two main pieces of directing advice in rehearsals were“Know your lines” and “Speak up.” Sometimes I wondered where all the energy I had seen while redirecting them in class had gone.

Unlike onstage work, though, Dirigo High School students didn’t feel awkward handling a basketball. The sport surrounded them their entire lives, from grade school teams on. A coach of younger players encouraged them to sleep with a basketball. Maybe he thought they would learn to handle it as easily as they moved pillows in the dark.

I used to be the person who would say things like “Why can’t they put on good plays too?” without realizing how many coaches had spent years trying to encourage skills within communities. What they had was much more awareness of the people in the area who might support a team. Interests needed to overlap.

It made more sense later when I heard the expression “develop a program.” Coaches needed more than just to have dedicated high school players. If they had enough local interest, players would develop skills as they went from team to team.

This explains why when town interests didn’t align with the school, little happened. I had a roommate who was the school guidance counselor who tried to convince parents not to let their high school-aged children drop out of advanced placement classes. But after the student complained about all the homework, the parents asked to transfer their children to another class because of the stress.

Parents did believe in working hard. We differed on what kinds.

Dixfield and the surrounding towns of Canton, Carthage and Peru were connected to the logging and paper industries. It was part of the air we breathed. Rumford had a giant paper mill whose sulfur stench felt deadly when it descended on me once in front of a local Rite-Aid.

The tallest structure in Dixfield was the lumberyard crane. It had a portable toilet at the top so whoever was running it wouldn’t have to climb down for a bathroom break.

Trucks either had giant logs piled in the back or carried chopped up pieces in a trailer. The scent of freshly cut wood was everywhere. I noticed it whenever my car was behind a rig with wood chips.

With the landscape centered around certain industries, students talked about working in the woods or the mill. The expectation to sign up for demanding jobs also turned out teams that succeeded a lot more than one would expect. We averaged 200 total students in the building.

Dirigo players weren’t underdogs because they won so often. Even when they were losing, though, teens played hard and were fun to watch.

But Dixfield wasn’t alone when it came to a small Maine town’s passion for sports. I knew a former athletic director who worked at Madison High School in another part of the state. He was at a basketball game when he told a parent, “Please don’t swear at your son, ma'am.” The mother probably cursed out her son because of a mistake. 

On certain days, it was like I was a visitor from another country rather than a 90-minute drive from Portland. During the winter, students rode their snowmobiles to school. The narrow lockers in the hallway couldn’t hold their helmets so snowmobilers turned them in at the main office at the start of the day.

The experience of feeling like a stranger extended to extracurriculars. Sports was the main event, no matter how hard I or anyone else tried to suggest something else.

Much of what I had trouble with seems obvious now: I was experiencing life in a different culture. I was warned. A teacher told me after I was hired that a Social Studies teacher at Dirigo once called a parent about their child’s low scores. The teacher said he didn’t think the teen cared that much about history.

“Who does?!” the parent replied.

As a teen, I heard about peer pressure as much as the dangers of cigarettes and alcohol. It was another bad influence. What I didn’t notice was if you added enough friends, classmates, parents, neighbors and grandparents, pretty soon it wasn’t a few people having influence, it was a whole community.

Nobody decried adult peer pressure. Nor did anyone refer to “town pressure.” It was local support. 

The support could be great to see. Whenever a Dirigo team took to the floor of the Augusta Civic Center for basketball playoffs, the Carthage jokes were gone. An entire section of seats would have people wearing navy blue t-shirts to show support for the Dirigo Cougars. 

The girls basketball team made the playoffs regularly when I taught there. Players impressed me with how they stayed focused in high-intensity situations as if they had done it a hundred times before. I knew that wasn’t an accident, having been a grade school player who would listen to the coach during a time out then forget everything when I stepped back on the court.

At times I wished that the drive I saw during tournament time could continue in different outlets at Dirigo High School. Lots of teachers have probably felt the same as they cheered on their teams.

Yet even with the perspective of “If they could do that in other ways, like in class,” I found myself pulled into a sports orbit. The girls basketball coach was so successful people mentioned him by his first name. Everyone understood. I still remember. The coach was also polite enough to say hi to me whenever we bumped into each other even though I was the new guy.

As for the chief administrator of the school district when I taught at Dirigo, other than knowing him as the superintendent, I have trouble recalling him. Maybe his name was Dave.

His office was a dozen steps from the high school building. The superintendent parked his pickup truck in the same lot as the teachers. It had a bumper sticker with an anti-drug message about encouraging young people to fish. And I can’t remember him as clearly as the girls basketball coach.