The games begin

Let’s see who’s citius, altius, fortius

By Sam Pfeifle

Never have the Olympics seemed so attainable. While Carrabassett Valley Academy’s Bode Miller (two golds and a silver) and Kirsten Clark (silver) made skiing’s best cower before them at the World Championships in St. Moritz last week, every Mainer who ever crashed gates had to be smiling. Thousands of kids in Maine know exactly what it’s like each week to shiver in the starting gate, clad only in a skin-tight GS suit, waiting for mechanized beeps to signal their descent down the hill. Knowing that those runs down Sugarloaf’s Narrow Gauge or Comp Hill could ultimately result in becoming the world’s best is pretty gratifying.

But what if the Olympics aren’t in the cards? What if nature didn’t grant you steely nerves and a pair of pneumatic pistons for thighs? Should athletic pursuits end with high school, or maybe inter-mural sports in college?

Jeff Scully and Sean Casey don’t think so. This year they’ll be opening up hundreds of competitive options for Maine athletes of all ages and abilities with the introduction of the Maine Games, making Maine the 41st state to bring an Olympic-style sporting event to a state-wide audience and competitive field.

With the event planned for sporting fields and venues all around Portland during the last two weekends of June, Scully and Casey are hoping to start with roughly 3000 competitors in at least 11 sports: swimming, track & field, wrestling, soccer, lacrosse, ice hockey, basketball, orienteering, road racing, volleyball, and baton twirling — with another one or two possibly to be added. That alone entails a pretty massive undertaking, but consider that New York’s Empire State Games attract roughly 50,000 athletes — Scully and Casey would love to approach numbers like that.

“I participated in the Iowa Games in 1989,” says Scully of his introduction to the idea. “I was living in Maine, but went back to Iowa for an extended visit . . . They were only in their fourth year of operation, but they had tens of thousands of athletes on the Iowa University campus. I thought that would be a cool thing to have in Maine, but really didn’t have any idea where to begin.”

The thought never left Scully, and when he had an opportunity this past summer to do some planning (job cutbacks), he decided to try to make a go of it. He contacted the National Congress of State Games office in Billings, Montana, and found that Casey held the rights to the Maine Games, so he called Casey up and they decided to get together.

“We agreed to meet in Belfast,” says Scully, “at McDonalds’s, and we discussed a potential collaboration. By the time we were in the parking lot, we shook hands and decided it was something we wanted to do.”

The organizing necessitated three distinct phases of ramping up. First, they had to create the organization that would run the Maine Games, going through the rigmarole of establishing 5013c status and surrounding themselves with a board of veteran non-profit advisors. Second, they had to raise a serious amount of money — more than $200,000 to staff an office, buy computers, rent venues, and do all the things necessary to make 3000 athletes generally happy.

“We didn’t know how to go about doing that,” admits Scully. “We had experience getting 50 bucks from gas stations for Little League, but big money we didn’t know how to do.” Luckily, at a gathering of state games commissioners, Scully ran into the man who runs Georgia’s big affair, and he flew Scully back down south with him to participate in a two-hour seminar about raising big bucks from big corporate donors. That included meeting with a former Coca-Cola executive who knew all about giving big grants.

“After that crash course in fundraising, I came home and spoke with Coke here,” says Scully. “Within a few minutes, I decided the best thing I ever did was to go down to Georgia. He wanted to help almost immediately and we spent most of the time just talking sports. He’s actually involved now in our lacrosse event.”

Now that they’ve met certain fundraising goals, Casey and Scully can finally start organizing the games themselves (phase three). “That’s the part we’ve been able to devote the least amount of attention to,” says Scully. “It’s a multi-level process: what games to include, finding commissioners and volunteers, finding venues that could support a large event.” In the end, they had to balance what they wanted to do with what they realistically could make happen.

So, while their goal is to provide competition for athletes of all ages and abilities in as many sports as possible, some things have been purposely left out for this inaugural event. While orienteering will be open to competitors aged five to 90, and have as many as 15 divisions for both men and women, team sports like basketball and soccer will be limited to the younger kids. Us older guys are so desperate for good competition that Scully knows he wouldn’t be able to handle the demand.

“We need to make sure we stay within ourselves,” he says, “and that’s a reason we haven’t added softball either. If we did that, we could count on 500 to 600 athletes, and we’re just not prepared for that.” So, they’ll grow slowly, hoping to add three or four events and expansions of events each year.

It’s certainly a cool idea, and it truly heats up on April 1, when the Maine Games will start their athlete registration process. It will cost about $20 an event to register (more for ice hockey, due to expensive ice time), and it will be open to any amateur who’s been living in Maine continuously for 30 days prior to registration. (Check www.mainegames.org for updates on events and registration.)

So start your training. I’m hoping for a “fat and slow” division in the 500-meter freestyle swimming. I’d be a lock for gold.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com. “Game On” tackles all manner of marginal sports and runs once a month.