The 207 is our cross-sport school ranking, the one that takes every program at every school across the state and rolls them into a single number. It is the only place on the site where Falmouth boys lacrosse and Madawaska softball and Mount View basketball all sit in the same column and have to share the math. The rankings just shifted in a meaningful way, and we want to walk you through what changed, why, and how the system was designed from day one to make sure smaller schools competing hard in fewer sports still get seen.
Before anything else, this part.
The 207 was built around one non-negotiable principle. A school that does not offer eleven sports should not be punished for it. A small school that fields four or five programs and is competitive in most of them is doing something genuinely impressive, and the math has to recognize that. We are not going to reward sheer roster volume over real performance. We are not going to bury a Class D school with a 75 percent win rate underneath a Class A school that is barely above .500 in twice as many sports.
Two pieces of the formula handle this directly. The breadth multiplier we use does not require eleven sports, it caps at seven. A small school that fields six sports and wins in five of them gets the same 1.07 breadth bonus as a giant Class A school with eleven sports and five winning records. And the Punching Above Weight badge exists specifically to flag schools that are crushing it relative to their size, regardless of where the composite number lands. We will get to both. Just want it on the table first.
Lacrosse joined the lineup.
The 207 now includes lacrosse alongside basketball, hockey, soccer, baseball, softball, football, volleyball, field hockey, cross country, and track and field. Eleven sports, every one of them feeding the same composite. Sixty five schools across the state have at least one lacrosse program in our database this spring, and every one of those schools now has that program counting toward their statewide ranking.
Lacrosse in Maine is concentrated in the southern half of the state and along the coast, with a strong middle band into the Kennebec Valley. Schools that field both a boys and girls lacrosse program (Falmouth, Messalonskee, Kennebunk, Greely, Maranacook/Winthrop, Camden Hills, and a couple dozen more) just picked up two more avenues toward the breadth multiplier, plus their lacrosse ratings now count toward the average that drives the raw score.
A school that does not field lacrosse is not penalized for it. They are working from a smaller pool of available sports toward the same breadth count, which the formula already accounts for. If your school plays six sports and wins five, you are still pulling the same 1.07 breadth bonus that an eleven-sport school pulls when they win five. That has not changed.
Co-ops now properly credit every member school.
This was the bigger overdue fix, and it shifted the rankings more than the lacrosse addition did. Maine is full of cooperative programs (especially in hockey, where small schools combine to field one varsity team) and our ranking system had been crediting only one of those member schools for the co-op's record. The math is now what it should have been all along.
When the Cony Co-Op hockey team plays a game, every school in that co-op get hockey credit on The 207: Cony, Monmouth, Erskine, Mount Blue, Hall-Dale, Maranacook, Spruce Mountain, and Winthrop. When the Trail Blazers hockey team plays, Windham and Westbrook and Bonny Eagle and Sacopee Valley all get the credit. The Black Hawks, Blue Devils, IceCats, BGR-BRW-NARRA-SKOW, Portland COOP, and Gardiner Boys hockey teams all now properly credit every member school they actually represent.
The schools that gained the most from this are the small ones who had been getting shorted. Maranacook is now sitting at the maximum eleven sports in The 207. Hall-Dale, Hodgdon, Katahdin, Spruce Mountain, GHCA, Southern Aroostook, and Central Aroostook all picked up a sport they had not been getting credit for. None of those schools changed what they were doing on the ice. The math just finally caught up.
The current top of the board.
Thornton Academy sits at the top of The 207. Class A South, ten sports, seven of them with winning records as of today, lacrosse boys at 4-0 with a wide run differential helping considerably. Scarborough is second, also Class A South with seven winning sports. Cheverus is third with six winning sports and the highest single-class average PIR in the top five.
Yarmouth is fourth out of Class B, the first Class B program on the board. Gardiner is fifth with eight winning sports across eleven, the most winning sports of any school in Maine and one of two programs running every one of the eleven sports we track. Cony, the other one, sits at eleventh because they fielded all eleven sports through their co-op partnerships and won in seven of them.
Gorham, Mount Ararat, Falmouth, Leavitt, and Bangor round out the top ten. Three Class B schools (Yarmouth, Gardiner, Leavitt) are sitting inside the top ten alongside seven Class A schools, which is exactly the kind of cross-class competitive balance the breadth multiplier was built to surface. Greely and Messalonskee both sit just outside the top ten and are still very much in the conversation. Bangor Christian, the lone 8-player class school in the top fifteen, has both their boys and girls programs producing strong winter results and now picks up hockey credit through the John Bapst/Hermon/Bangor Christian co-op.
How the math actually works.
Three components, multiplied together. First, the raw score, which is 60 percent average PIR across every sport the school plays plus 40 percent overall win percentage in their team sports. Second, a class multiplier, where Class AA is 1.25, Class A is 1.15, Class B is 1.10, Class C is 1.00 (the baseline), Class D is 0.90, and 8-player is 0.85. Third, a breadth multiplier that rewards being good at a lot of things at once. Zero winning sports gets 0.60. Seven or more winning sports gets 1.18. The middle slots step up smoothly: four winning sports is the baseline 1.00, five is 1.07, six is 1.13.
That class multiplier is where most of the questions land, so let's talk about it directly. A Class A school plays a tougher schedule than a Class C school. Their wins are harder. Their losses are softer. The class weight reflects that reality. A 12-0 record in Class A is genuinely a different accomplishment than a 12-0 record in Class D, and pretending otherwise would make the rankings useless. The class multiplier is not a punishment for small schools. It is a structural recognition that not all 12-0 records are equal.
Punching Above Their Weight.
Now back to the part we promised at the top. The Punching Above Weight badge goes to schools that finish in the top 35 percent of the rankings while sitting in the bottom 50 percent of statewide enrollment. It is not a consolation prize. It is the part of the system designed specifically to make sure that the kind of school that runs three programs out of one gym, that ferries the same 14 kids through three seasons a year, that has a coach driving the bus on the way to road games, gets credit for what they are actually doing.
Right now that badge belongs to a list of schools we are proud to read out. North Yarmouth Academy in Class C, sitting at #24 overall on a 50-23 record across nine sports. Maranacook in C, #29 overall, 82-48 across the maximum eleven sports. Bucksport in C, #30 with a 41-17 record. Monmouth in C, #35 with seven of ten sports winning. Winthrop in C, #36 at 62 percent across nine sports. Penobscot Valley in D, #42 at 73 percent. Old Orchard Beach in C, #43 at 67 percent. Orono in C, #46. Machias in D, #34. Washington Academy in C, #51 with seven sports running. And Stearns in D, #25 overall, with five winning sports across six.
These are eleven different stories, eleven different student bodies, eleven different geographies. Maranacook puts every kid on a roster. Penobscot Valley wins at three out of four sports they offer. Stearns competes in 8-player country and finds ways to win. North Yarmouth Academy plays in the smallest class and routinely outperforms much larger programs.
These are the schools The 207 was designed to make visible. The math sees them. The badge says it out loud.
Three things to know if you're new to The 207.
One. Every school in the database is included. We are not curating who shows up. If a school plays in the MPA in any of the eleven sports we track, that school is in the rankings.
Two. The number you see on each school's row is computed live every time the page loads. It is not a hand-tuned subjective ranking, it is not a poll, and there is no committee. It is a formula you can audit. If you want to see exactly how the number was built for any school, click into their school page and you will see every sport, every record, every PIR.
Three. The rankings update every morning. Yesterday's softball doubleheader and last night's lacrosse game are both in today's number. There is no waiting for a Sunday night release. Every game played changes the math, and the math is what you see.
Why we run it this way.
Maine is a small state with a lot of personality, and the schools in it are not the same. Some have 1,800 students and a turf field. Some have 95 students and one bus. The whole point of The 207 is to put all of them in the same conversation while still being honest about the differences. The class multiplier handles the size honesty. The breadth multiplier, capped at seven sports, handles the fewer-sports honesty. The Punching Above Weight badge handles the recognition honesty.
It is not a perfect system. Nothing that tries to compare a varsity hockey program to a varsity track and field program to a varsity field hockey program is going to be perfect. What it is, is a single number that takes a clear methodology, applies it the same way to every school in the state, and is recomputed every morning from the actual results on the actual fields. That is the goal. That has always been the goal.
If you want to see the rankings, head to the rankings page. And if your school's ranking looks off, click into the school page first, and if something is genuinely wrong, email us. We answer.