Football game in Dexter more than a homecoming for Mount View’s Pratt

DEXTER, Maine — When a football player wearing red fell to the turf during Saturday’s Dexter-Mount View game, Haggie Pratt acted instinctively.

Who would expect anything else from the veteran coach, now in his third season at Mount View of Thorndike?

BDN file photo

HAGGIE PRATT talks to his players while coaching the Nokomis football team in August 2012. The Dexter native is now guiding the Mount View football team.

Pratt grew up in Dexter, wore Tiger red as a 4:37 miler for the school’s track team, was the school’s head football coach for a dozen years and still coaches high school track and field and middle-school basketball in his hometown as well as working in his alma mater’s special education department.

He still lives in Dexter, too, but for this afternoon he was merely a visitor — most of the time.

“When Chandler Perkins went down I stepped right out on the field to go see how he was doing,” recalled Pratt after Mount View’s 41-8 victory.  “I saw a kid in red down and I just wanted to see how he was doing because Chandler was a kid who played basketball for me in junior high. He’s one of those kids that almost feels like your own so the instinct is to want to be there for him.”

While Pratt has not coached varsity football at Dexter in 10 years, he has remained active in the sport regionally, first guiding neighboring Nokomis of Newport for five seasons before returning to the Little Ten Conference ranks with Mount View in 2013.

Despite the geographic proximity of those schools, Saturday’s Class D North matchup marked the first time Pratt had been forced to look into the sun throughout a varsity contest from the opponent’s sideline at Tiger Field.

“That’s the first time I’ve drove from my home and got on a bus and drove back here and coached from that sideline. I was on the other side for 12 years, the shady side of the field,” he said.

Pratt was bittersweet about his role as a coach trying to defeat Dexter, from where he graduated in 1974 and began coaching football as an assistant in 1985.

It’s a feeling that can be traced to all he experienced during his two decades with the program.

Pratt was part of a coaching staff that guided Dexter to the 1985 Class D state championship and the 1987 Class C state title, and shortly after taking over as head coach in 1994 he nearly saw the program eliminated, as the sport originally was eliminated from the school budget in 1995 before being restored.

The Tigers subsequently struggled in the wake of population losses related to mill closings in the community and due to the growth of soccer locally. Those struggles ultimately to Pratt’s departure from the program after the 2005 season.

Beyond the bottom line there are the coaching relationships he has maintained with the ensuing crops of Dexter athletes, relationships he largely had to set aside this week in the best interests of his current team, which is battling Dexter for perhaps the same postseason berth come late October.

“It was a stressful week in a way,” he said. “Some of the kids that I’ve coached didn’t want to look at me because they consider you the enemy in that way, but it just means a lot to them, too, and they’re good kids.

“This wasn’t a fun game for me.”

The lead-up to the contest featured Pratt enduring some ribbing in the school hallways from current Dexter players who remembered a win over Pratt and Mount View at Thorndike two years ago.

“The last time we played Dexter it didn’t turn out in our favor so I got some good-natured teasing from some of the kids,” said Pratt. “I just bit my lip and took it. They told me they were going to shut down a couple of our plays and they did shut down one of them, the option play, but they didn’t shut our counter down.”

In the end Mount View used its size advantage along the line of scrimmage and four touchdown plays of 20 yards or longer to subdue a Dexter squad armed with the hard-nosed edge he could recall from his own tenure on the home sideline.

“I’ve watched these kids play in a lot of games since junior high and they do a lot of good things,” he said, “but they’re a little banged up right now and they don’t have quite enough players.”

The win was significant for a Mount View team that will take a 2-0 record into this Saturday’s showdown at home against defending LTC champion Maine Central Institute of Pittsfield, which  has defeated its first two opponents by a combined 131-0.

Mount View has nearly double the number of players it fielded a year ago, but while a sense of optimism is developing a postseason berth is seen as the next step toward sustaining that momentum.

“I always tried to keep it in my mind that this game was important because of playoff implications,” said Pratt.

Yet there was no doubt of the personal side of Haggie Pratt’s bus ride back home, too.

“I hate to see that red team lose,” said Pratt. “I hate to see that red team lose, and to feel like I really had something to do with them losing is not something that’s pleasant for me. This is where I’ve always lived. I went to school here and as an athlete I gave the school everything I had.

“I love the Dexter kids, and I’m just glad we got through the game with nobody seeming to get hurt on each side.”