Town Shares Pride in Team

When the Cavaliers of Valley High hit the road for the tournament, their tiny hometown of Bingham pretty much shut down so folks could follow the team to Maine’s capital.

And when they’re home, well, forget it.

People drive through blizzards--sometimes on snowmobiles--for a chance to delight in their team’s no-look lightning passes and style of play that’s as clean as the air in their rustic corner of Maine.

At the time of the state championship game two years ago, a “wicked snowstorm” failed to deter hardy Valley fans such as Betty Price.

“I don’t think there was anyone left in town,” said Price, who was decked out in a Cavaliers T-shirt, earrings and pins last week.

Upper Kennebec Valley Memorial Junior and Senior High School--in short, Valley--is in a logging and whitewater-rafting outpost of about 1,200 in western Maine’s forest.

In Maine, however, Bingham is best known for its basketball team, which going into the weekend was on an 82-game winning streak and working toward its fourth straight state championship.

“No matter where you go, when people ask where you’re from and you say Bingham, they say, ‘Oh, a good basketball team,”’ said 16-year-old Valley sophomore Lacey Miller, her face painted with a blue VHS, as she awaited the start of Wednesday’s game.

Behind her in the stands of the Augusta Civic Center was “pretty much the whole town,” said Miller, holding her kindergartner sister whose face also bore the Valley colors.

Valley’s enrollment of 130 puts it squarely in the smallest category among the four divisions in Maine interscholastic play, but that doesn’t matter to the Cavaliers or their followers.

In a Christmas tournament earlier this season, they dispatched Bangor High, the defending state champions in the biggest-enrollment class, 69-41. In the same tourney, they beat another big-class power, Cony of Augusta.

The Cavaliers outscore their opponents by an average of nearly 50 points per game. Their only defeat since 1997 came in a holiday tournament, so it doesn’t count in the won-loss record.

The last team to beat Valley in a game that counted, Portland’s Waynflete, found itself down 19-0 five minutes into Wednesday’s game and lost 83-40.

In the Cavaliers’ typical style, there was no big scorer, no big star.

Once the starters established an edge, there was plenty of traffic from the bench. At the end, the crowd went wild when freshman Tony Hibbard, barely 5 feet tall, trotted onto the court.

Starters include 6-foot-3 redheaded twins Jason and Luke Hartwell, who have been playing basketball with their teammates since they were all peewees in first to third grades.

“We won at every level. We’re just used to winning,” Jason said. Keeping from getting distracted by the lengthy win streak is a big challenge.

“We put that out the door,” Jason said. “We just play our game.”

Luke said basketball is pretty much the only thing to do in Bingham -- if you don’t ride a snowmobile.

When they were in junior high, the boys would shovel snow off an outdoor court and then chip 2 or 3 inches of ice away just so they could play, senior point guard Nick Pelotte said.

“They had to be resurfaced a couple of times,” said Pelotte, who averages 18 points and eight assists a game. “We were just so anxious (to play) that we just cut off the ice and out-of-bounds was the snow.”

In the warmer weather, “pretty much every night you could count on pickup games,” he said.

Besides playing together, the Valley boys hang together off the court, helping one another with schoolwork, Greg Andre said as he watched his 6-foot-9 son Brian take a pass under the basket.

“I’ve never seen a group of kids so unselfish about sharing stuff,” said Andre, who put a “closed” sign on his motel so he could be in Augusta for the game.

The team even shares its success with its proud and adoring town, passing around its state championship trophy--a big gold basketball--from business to business.