Twenty-four sports. One makes money.
Maine high school athletics runs out of an office at 50 Industrial Drive in Augusta. The office has twelve people in it. They serve one hundred and forty-eight high schools. They sanction championships in nineteen activities for boys and fifteen for girls. Of those twenty-four total programs, exactly one makes a profit. Fourteen do not bring in enough money to cover their costs. Nine bring in nothing at all.
The basketball gold ball pays for everything else. The marquee weeks of the championship calendar carry the rest of the slate. Everything that does not turn a profit on its own gets carried.
The Maine Principals' Association does not advertise that. They do not run telethons or PSAs. They run schedules. They run brackets. They publish results. They have been doing it, in some form, since 1927.
The arc
In 1927, a few principals got together and called themselves the State Principals' Association. There were no email addresses, no software, no website. There was a calendar, mail, a phone, and the basic premise that Maine kids should have organized games to play against other Maine kids, with rules that did not change at the county line.
For sixty-five years that organization grew and split and reformed. In 1992, the Maine Secondary School Principals' Association and the Maine Elementary Principals' Association merged into one umbrella organization. They kept the name "Maine Principals' Association" because, plainly, that is what it was. A few hundred principals, from a few hundred schools, agreeing to share rules.
Today the interscholastic side has one hundred and forty-eight member high schools. Public and private. North and South. Class A through Class D/S. Every two years they are reclassified by enrollment so the competition stays honest, because schools grow and shrink and a Class B opponent five years ago is not necessarily a Class B opponent today.
The professional side has more than seven hundred members. Principals, assistant principals, retired administrators. People who run schools, supporting other people who run schools.
The interscholastic side covers more than people realize. Basketball, football, lacrosse, hockey, of course. But also debate, drama, speech, science fair, Student Council, National Honor Society, E-Sports, and Unified Basketball. Unified Basketball is the one where the league emphasizes that no single player dominates and every kid on the roster gets time on the floor. Twenty-four championships in all, from a state baseball title to a state speech tournament.
The Principal's Award
In 1984, the MPA started the Principal's Award. Every member school picks one senior, every year, who they think best represents academic excellence and citizenship. Not the top GPA, necessarily. Not the captain of the football team, necessarily. The one the principal believes is the kind of human being the school is proud of.
One hundred and forty-eight kids a year. One per school. They get a plaque. They get their names read at the Honors Luncheon in Augusta. And ten of them, chosen from the larger group, get a one thousand dollar scholarship in the name of a past Maine principal or a past MPA Executive Director.
One thousand dollars is not a full ride. It is gas money for a year of college. It is books. It is the symbol of the thing, which is that some adult in their school building wrote their name down and said: this one. This one represents us.
The Principal's Award has been doing that quietly, every spring, for forty-two years.
The people
The Maine Principals' Association has been quietly handed off a few times in its ninety-nine years, but always from the inside. Dick Durost ran the place for nearly two decades and retired in 2019. Mike Burnham, his assistant director of eleven years, took over that summer. Now, after seven years of his own at the top, Burnham is retiring at the end of this month. On July 1, Mike Bisson, the current Assistant Executive Director, becomes the next Executive Director.
That is three names in one short paragraph, and the pattern in them matters. Each one came up through the same office. Each one served as second in command before stepping into the role. The MPA does not bring in big name outside hires. They promote the assistant. The work is too specific to Maine.
The day-to-day staff in Augusta runs about twelve people. The board officers are elected from among the member principals themselves, meaning the leadership above the Executive Director is a working principal at a Maine high school taking on a state wide role in their evenings and weekends because somebody has to.
The work nobody sees
When girls ice hockey was sanctioned by the MPA as a championship sport in 2008, it was not a press release moment. It was a vote, a schedule, a venue, a set of officials, a bracket, and several hundred details that somebody had to figure out. Then the sport ran. Then the championship played. Then the trophy got engraved.
That happens twenty-four times a year, in twenty-four different activities, every single year.
The Cross Insurance Center hosts the basketball finals. Fitzpatrick Stadium hosts the football championships. The Augusta Civic Center, the Portland Exposition Building, and the Cumberland County Civic Center round out the basketball venue rotation depending on class and region. The MPA negotiates the venues, recruits and pays the officials, prints the brackets, and orders the trophies. Everything that has to happen for a championship to actually happen, somebody at MPA has to figure out.
One of those twenty-four programs covers its own cost. The other twenty-three need somebody to underwrite them. That somebody is the membership.
Not perfect
No organization that big, that old, and that visible runs without complaints. Coaches have opinions. Parents have opinions. Reporters have opinions. Reclassification is a fight every two years. Bracket seeding gets challenged every spring. Heal Points has been debated since the moment it was invented.
That is normal. That is what governance looks like. Nobody runs a fair championship for twenty-four sports across one hundred and forty-eight schools without sometimes making decisions that disappoint somebody.
But the system runs. Eight hundred and ninety-nine softball games happened in Maine this spring. Six hundred and fifty-five lacrosse games. Hundreds of volleyball matches across the fall. Every one of them with a referee, a scorebook, a bracket implication, and a paper trail somebody in Augusta can pull up if asked.
Ninety-nine years
Next year is the hundredth.
A hundred years of Maine principals showing up to organize games for Maine kids, mostly at a loss, mostly without applause, mostly because somebody has to. There is a version of the high school sports world where that organization is a private business that charges per game, or a for profit league that takes a cut of the gate, or a quasi governmental agency that runs schools too far from town to play each other out of existence.
Maine got the version where principals organized it themselves, and stayed not for profit, and let the basketball gold ball pay for the softball trophies. It is not glamorous. It is not well funded. It is not always right.
But the games happen. Every season. In every class. Across a state that runs from Kittery to Fort Kent. For a hundred years.
That is worth saying out loud.