Edward Little coach Dave Sterling, middle, yells instructions to his defense during a 2018 contest against Sanford at Walton Field in Auburn. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

Anyone wondering why southern Maine schools, specifically Thornton Academy, Bonny Eagle and Scarborough, have dominated Class A football in the 21st century wouldn’t even have to watch a game to have a lot of their questions answered.

“They’ve got some bigger athletes,” Edward Little coach Dave Sterling said, referring to the Class A powerhouses. “You go down to Thornton Academy for warm-ups and they’re 20 guys deep that are all over 6-4 and 220 pounds, stretching out.”

Edward Little, Lewiston and Oxford Hills will regularly line up across from those bigger athletes this fall in the new eight-team Class A. All three teams are hoping to close the gap and ultimately reach the level of dominance of their foes to the south.

Since 2001, only two schools north of Windham have lifted the gold ball in Class A, Bangor in 2001 and Lawrence in 2006. The hardware has otherwise stayed in Cumberland and York counties, led by Bonny Eagle collecting the trophy six times and Thornton Academy winning it four times.

During that time, Edward Little, Oxford Hills and Lewiston have barely been on the state championship radar. Only Edward Little has played for a state title (losing to Portland in 2002).

In 2013, the Maine Principals’ Association moved Cheverus, Deering, Portland and Windham to what was then Class A East to try to create more competitive balance between the regions.

Either Cheverus, Portland or Windham won the East (or North) every year before losing to the A West (or South) champion. But Oxford Hills coach Mark Soehren said the task of competing with the elite teams doesn’t seem as daunting as it did six years ago.

“I don’t think it will be as big as when we went from the Pine Tree Conference to Class A North,” he said. “There were some really good teams in A North, too. Besides Portland, you had Windham and Cheverus, who had been winning state championships.”

Last year, Oxford Hills came as close to winning a state championship as any of their nearby rivals have over the last decade but lost to Portland in overtime of the North regional final. The Vikings’ signature win last season was a 31-22 home victory over a rebuilding Bonny Eagle team in a North-South crossover game.

Edward Little and Lewiston had reason to think they were closing the gap on the Portland-area schools, too, playing more competitive games and even picking up a few victories against those teams in recent years.

Starting this fall, Windham and all three Portland schools will be playing in Class B. EL, Lewiston, Oxford Hills and Bangor are the holdovers from the North in Class A, and all will face the new Class A’s overwhelming favorites, Bonny Eagle, Scarborough and Thornton, during the regular season.

Local coaches lament not having another chance to prove how much they’ve leveled the playing field with the Portland teams this season. But instead of feeling like Sisyphus watching the boulder roll down the hill yet again, they welcome the opportunity for more head-to-head competition with the southern powerhouses.

“We’re really up for the challenge,” Sterling said. “We’ve been waiting to play some of those teams. We see them every summer doing our 7-on-7 in the Portland area. A lot of our guys play basketball and baseball and other sports against some of those guys, so the competitiveness is great.”

The competition doesn’t start with the kickoff or even pregame flexing contests. The local coaches agree it starts in the offseason, in the weight room.

New Lewiston coach Darren Hartley said the high school football programs that succeed in Maine, regardless of what class they are in, are the ones that win in offseason strength and conditioning. He believes local schools have had the athletes to compete but haven’t stressed training to those athletes to help them become their best as football players.

Darren Hartley begins his second stint as Lewiston High School’s football coach in 2019. Submitted Photo

Hartley previously coached at Lewiston (1997-99) and Edward Little (2006-09) and then watched his son, Grant, be named the Class A North player of the year in 2017 as EL’s quarterback. He also has coached the Blue Devils’ baseball team since 2018.

One of his first acts after being hired for his second Lewiston football stint was introducing the players to a program he and a strength and conditioning coach implemented in December of last year, a program modeled after the one that Grant, now a backup quarterback at the University of Maine, uses in Orono.

“One of the most significant contributors to our lack of being able to compete is the lack of commitment to the weight room. Our guys are weak,” Hartley said. “Our guys don’t understand the toughness, the camaraderie and the expectations that come from a year-round, significant weight-room program.”

Hartley sites Oxford Hills and Edward Little as role model programs for Lewiston, saying the weight room has been the biggest reason he thinks Lewiston has been lagging behind its rivals in recent years.

“We’re not tough because we’re not big and physical enough. That’s been the biggest piece, in my opinion,” he said.

Sterling said he looked to Edward Little’s perennially powerful basketball program and its coach, Mike Adams, for the blueprint on offseason strength and conditioning training and has been pleased with the results.

“By doing that, it’s really raised the level of performance, and the last couple of years we’ve been on the cusp,” Sterling said.

But getting teenagers to follow even a proven program isn’t easy. Soehren, who coached at Poland before taking over at Oxford Hills in 2012, believes kids are often intimidated by being in the weight room at first, or find the idea of following a program too daunting.

“We started doing some really simple stuff, like really low reps, never-to-failure type things, where the kids really got to see improvement,” he said. “Once they got in and saw that it really wasn’t that hard, they were more inclined to come in.”

Oxford Hills head coach Mark Soehren on the sideline during a game against Windham in 2017. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

“It’s not just about lifting in there,” Soehren added. “It’s about trust. It’s about building a culture outside of football practice with those kids.”

Coaches can’t just provide occasional support for players starting a weight program or leave them alone once their immersed in it, Hartley said.

“Some of my contemporaries believe it’s in kids to just do it on their own. They’re self-motivated. It’s not true,” Hartley said. “There’s an accountability piece and it needs to be followed through every single day.”

Oxford Hills adapted its program to break up the monotony of going to the weight room every day, making it more enticing for players by holding activities off campus two days a week during the summer program and mixing in fun competitions.

But even that isn’t enough to overcome some of the other challenges that central Maine schools face that many their counterparts to the south don’t, many of them economic. Even finding transportation to and from offseason training can be difficult, especially in a sprawling rural school district such as Oxford Hills.

“Our kids don’t have a lot of money. We fund-raise specifically for that,” Soehren said.

While Oxford Hills may have higher enrollment, participation rates aren’t on the level with many smaller schools to the south, Soehren said, who added his high school’s tech and forestry programs are filled with potential football players who have other priorities.

“Those kids are generally working. They’re not spending their time at practice, and a lot of it is they’re going out and earning a living and helping their family,” he said.

Edward Little has drawn some of the basketball team’s biggest and best players, Storm Jipson, John Shea and Cam Yorke, to the gridiron this fall to help address some of the size discrepancy.  He’s also excited that, for the first time in his 10 years at EL, his offensive line will all weigh in at more than 220 pounds.

“We’ve had more athletes come back to football that are really good contributors, guys that have stepped away from football for a year and come back,” Sterling said. “”It’s nice that we’ve got some kids that are in condition that are big bodies to try to match up. I see (the improvement) continuing.”

Hartley said it will take time for him to see similar results.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he said. “I want to get better immediately, but it takes time to instill that expectation and the continuous follow through,” he said.

“It’s not easy,” he added. “We’re still trying to teach kids it’s a year-round thing. This is a year-round gig, and if you don’t get bigger, faster and stronger, we’re never going to compete.”