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| Maine Maritime Academy athletics file photo |
By Pat Coleman
D3sports.com
It’s official: Football is coming back to Maine Maritime Academy.
Other schools have announced they were suspending their football program, including Principia in 2009 and Earlham in 2018. But Maine Maritime succeeded in bringing football back, and will resume a varsity schedule in 2025, after playing non-varsity games the next two seasons.
And when those Mariners return to the gridiron in 2025, it will be as an associate member of the Commonwealth Coast Conference. Previously, Maine Maritime Academy had participated in the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference, which included football programs from New England as well as Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
When Maine Maritime suspended football in August 2020, there was no reason to believe this suspension was any different than any other in Division III in the past quarter-century. But Maine Maritime always had people in the administration’s ear talking about football, and a new president was receptive.
“We are a school that values tradition and football is one of the oldest traditions woven into the fabric of our existence,” said Stephen Peed, athletic director at Maine Maritime. “We are also a school that values teamwork and camaraderie and those values are built into the game. Our alumni were vocal in wanting the program back throughout the suspension.”
And it didn’t hurt to have a new president on board. Jerry Paul, a 1989 Maine Maritime Academy graduate, became the academy president in April 2022.
“When President Paul came on board in April, he started looking at the issue immediately,” said Peed. “He wanted to know what it would take to get us pointed in the right direction and how soon we could get there. When he was provided with a plan, he asked the alumni to help with the startup costs and they stepped up to help get us back on track.”
Maine Maritime began fundraising to restore the program in September 2022, and raised $562,000 over a three-month period, covering 75% of the academy’s unbudgeted costs to restart the program’s operation.
The Harold Alfond Foundation was the most substantial contributor to the effort, supplying $250,000 by way of an unrestricted matching grant. The academy received $566,778 in gifts from a total of 155 donors.
Joining the Commonwealth Coast Conference will give Maine Maritime a more geographically compact conference schedule, and will give the CCC an eighth conference member, solidifying the conference’s automatic bid and easing scheduling for conference members. The CCC in 2025 is slated to consist of Curry, Endicott, Husson, Maine Maritime, Nichols, University of New England and Western New England.
“This is a wonderful day for the Commonwealth Coast Conference and Division III football in New England,” said Gregg Kaye, the CCC commissioner. “For more than 50 years, the New England Football Conference was special, groundbreaking and unique. Maine Maritime was a founding member of the NEFC, a football conference that lives on in today’s Commonwealth Coast Conference. The CCC is ecstatic to be the new football home for Maine Maritime, an institution that played such an important role in the NEFC for more than half a century.”
Maine Maritime is preparing for a full, 10-game slate in 2025, coinciding with the first year of competition in the CCC. When the school takes the field for its first varsity game, it will carry in a 22-game losing streak, dating to its Oct. 14, 2017 win against Coast Guard. Having two full years to recruit and play games before playing a varsity game gives Maine Maritime a good shot at retiring that streak early on.