Summer game sets players up for future

GUILFORD — The gymnasium was warm Monday night, but not because it was packed with fans as it might be during the heart of winter.

The gathering of parents and friends was surprisingly large for this time of year, but the heat of the night was merely the warmth of the summer solstice permeating the walls of Piscataquis Community Secondary School.

For players from PCSS and neighboring Dexter Regional High School, this summer basketball game marked just another evening of preparation for a tournament quest that won’t come until well past the winter solstice.

“It’s good to get the whole team together during the summer to experience each other and develop good chemistry for the coming year,” said Bryce Gilbert, a rising junior at PCSS. “It really helps us get comfortable with each other so we know each other’s skill sets, what we’re best at and how to utilize that during the season.”

“It’s good to just work with my teammates and get more team chemistry going,” added Jason Campbell, who will be a senior this fall at Dexter. “But it’s mostly just to have fun and refresh your mind about plays and stuff.”

The summer sports season is relatively brief, from shortly after the end of the school year until two weeks before the start of preseason practices for fall sports in mid-August — a dead period mandated at the high school level by the Maine Principals’ Association to give student-athletes a respite before the next school year.

Many of the kids who were playing in this contest spread their time among multiple sports during the heart of the summer, making for a busy schedule.

Cameron Kane, who will be a junior at PCSS, finds time for basketball, soccer and AAU baseball.

“It’s good to have a couple of days off to rest and get ready to be able to play again,” Kane said. “But I like playing all the sports.”

Coaches strive to develop the right mix of skill development and fun for their players, understanding that players will miss games or practices for a variety of reasons ranging from family vacations to other events. One Dexter player was absent Monday night because he was attending Dirigo Boys State.

Making summer basketball fun typically means having more games than practices.

“The reality of it is I think we’d be better off practicing because when we practice for 90 minutes a kid can have a ball in his hands for an hour,” said veteran PCSS boys basketball coach Jamie Russell. “But when we play six quarters and we’re alternating quarters between JV and varsity or in our case even some middle-school kids, how many touches can they get in a game?

“But the kids want to play games, and practices in the summer are a tough sell sometimes so we mix it up a little where we’ll have three or four games and then a practice.”

Sometimes that individual skill development is dependent on a player making the most of his free time.

“One of the things we try to encourage is that if they have an hour tomorrow when they’re home to work on something that we saw tonight that they can get better at,” said Russell.

One challenge for coaches comes when some players get more playing time during the summer because more established players in the program have other obligations.

“You can give kids some false hopes because some nights you might be playing some kids who might not be getting that many minutes next winter,” said Russell. “But that’s also a window of opportunity for them.”

Summer basketball, like other sports, has evolved over time.

In the Penquis region, area schools once congregated in Dexter for the Moosehead League, where rival teams played a 10-game schedule two or three nights a week for three weeks. That represented the entire summer basketball program.

Today many schools still field teams in leagues around the region in addition to a more localized schedule — and that doesn’t count many players spending a week at a summer basketball camp.

“There’s pros and cons to all of that,” said Russell, whose program blends 15 to 20 mostly local games with several practices during its summer schedule. “I kind of like what we do here because we get the younger kids involved and don’t really worry about the final score of the games, we erase the score after every quarter.”

And while the players do enjoy the free time they get during summer vacation, it’s time many often prefer filling with the sports they enjoy at school.

“This is usually all I really want to do anyways,” said Gilbert.