MHS Winter Sports are getting started
When the Messalonskee girls’ basketball team opens its 2024-25 season tonight against Nokomis in Newport what is likely to stand out the most is what is missing.
Keith Derosby, the Eagles head coach for 13 years following 12 years as an assistant to the boys’ basketball team, will no longer be on the sideline. Instead, Tatum Welch, a former assistant coach for the Winslow girls’ basketball team, will be in control.
Derosby isn’t stepping away from the sport he loves. He is simply switching schools, taking over as the head coach of the Monmouth Mustangs, a high school located in the community where he and his family live.
The move might eventually enable Derosby to coach his daughter, a basketball player at the youth league level in Monmouth currently.
“It is refreshing in a different way,” Derosby said about being Monmouth coach. “It is a new challenge. It is about being in my community and doing something for my community.”
Derosby coached his first game as Monmouth coach earlier this week – an experience he said he won’t soon forget.
“It was surreal at first,” he said. “Every first is surreal.”
But Derosby said life got back to normal pretty quickly.
“Once the game starts, once the practice starts, high school kids are high school kids … There are some universals that help me keep grounded.”
Apart from the change at the helm of the girls’ basketball team, the coaching staff of Messalonskee’s winter sports teams is unchanged save for Kathryn Souviney taking over as indoor track coach.
Also unchanged is that with that start of December the winter sports season is ready to launch into regular season mode. Along with the girls’ basketball game in Newport, the sports calendar features the boys’ basketball team against Nokomis at Messalonskee at 6:30 p.m. tonight.
Messalonskee swimmers, meanwhile, begin their competition 30 minutes earlier against Lincoln Academy at the Wiscasset Community Center.
Saturday rounds out the weekend athletics slate with the boys’ ice hockey team facing Lewiston at 6 p.m. at The Colisee in Lewiston, the wrestling competing at 9 a.m in the Belfast Tournament at Belfast High School, and the girls’ hockey team playing Greely at 5:30 p.m. at the Falmouth Family Ice Arena in Falmouth.