In this newspaper clipping from 1989, Marshwood football coach Rod Wotton celebrates with his team after defeating Skowhegan, 26-14, to win the Class A championship. Original photo by Merry Farnum. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

They were a team with all the physical tools required for high school football greatness. They had a beloved and trusted coach who had already won 15 state championships.

Most of all, the 1989 Marshwood High Hawks had something to prove.

After two-plus decades of dominating Maine’s lower classes, winning championships in Class D, 13 times in C, and then an undefeated Class B title in 1988, the boys from Eliot and South Berwick and their already legendary coach, Rod Wotton, were moving up to Class A.

“I was interviewed by somebody before the season and I told them I thought we would go undefeated,” said Steve Knight, the team’s star running back, who is by nature quite humble. “I don’t remember if it ever made it into the paper, or a TV interview, but that’s the way we felt. We really didn’t know how to lose.”

Marshwood, a school of 626 students, proved it was more than capable of playing against the state’s largest schools. With the powerful 1-2 running punch of halfback Knight (then school-record 1,454 rushing yards) and fullback Abel Schultze (725 yards) operating in a brutally efficient scheme behind a big, mobile offensive line, Marshwood went 12-0 and won the Class A state championship, outscoring opponents 410-99.

“Maybe the best high school football team I’ve seen in Maine. I think it might be,” said Mike Lowe, a Press Herald sportswriter from 1982-2022. “They had everything. Not fancy or anything.

“More than anything, they wanted to prove that Marshwood was the best football program in the state, regardless of class, and it really was. They proved it that year.”

Marshwood’s Steve Knight scores a touchdown against Massabesic in the opening game of the 1989 season. Thirty-five years ago, Marshwood decided to challenge itself in Class A against the state’s largest schools. With a legendary coach and a team of motivated and talented players, the Hawks went 12-0 and won the state title. Original photo by Tom Hoyt. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

Marshwood’s 1989 Class A championship team will be inducted as a group into the newly created Marshwood Hall of Fame and Excellence. The ceremony is from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Sunday at Marshwood High’s auditorium. The public is invited. Knight, who won the Fitzpatrick Trophy that season and went on to lead the University of Maine in rushing in 1993 and 1994, will be inducted as an individual, along with Wotton and current assistant coach Alan Robertshaw, who played on Wotton’s first state title team in 1966 and was an assistant coach in 1989.

Robertshaw said players and coaches in 1989 were ready, willing and able to move to Class A after going 12-0 without a single significant challenge in Class B in 1988.

“It was boring,” said Robertshaw, 74. “We were killing everybody. It was really bad.”

Schultze, 52, who lives in his hometown of Eliot, said he and other players spent most of the 1988 season begging Wotton to find some stronger opponents.

“We’d be telling him, ‘We practice all week and we only get to play for 10 minutes. We’re not even washing our jerseys this week. We didn’t even get dirty.'”

The 1988 season ended with a 32-6 win against Bucksport on a muddy Hill Stadium field at Thornton Academy (no artificial turf in those days).

It helped soothe the wounds from 1987, when the Hawks’ 45-game winning streak – the longest in the nation for one week – was snapped in a 20-0 loss to Wells in the Western Class B final. Several key Marshwood players had been suspended for breaking team rules prior to the Wells game.

“I don’t think anybody wanted to make an excuse of saying (the suspensions were) why we lost,” said Knight, 52, a resident of Danvers, Massachusetts. “But losing that one game and knowing that feeling of what it’s like, you just dig a little deeper and say, ‘That’s not going to happen to us again.'”

After the 1988 title, Wotton knew his entire backfield of Knight, Schultze, wingback Cory Carignan and quarterback Geoff Gordon would be back the following season. Center Scott Edwards missed the 1988 season because of an injury, but tackles Chad Sylvester and Scott Webber and guards Josh Knight (no relation to Steve) and Justin Rosberg all would be returning starters. Defensive standouts like lineman Mike Adamets, tight ends/defensive ends K.C. Powers and Todd Schnobrich, linebackers Fred Constine and Jason Kast, and cornerbacks Kyle Glidden and Jason Parent would also be back.

“Wotton knew if we ever wanted to move up to Class A, this was the team,” said Butch Arthers, who joined Robertshaw, Tom O’Malley and Lee Petrie as assistant coaches. “When we won the (1988) state championship, he said, ‘Let’s do it.”

Marshwood’s move to Class A was approved early in 1989. There was plenty of time to speculate about whether Marshwood could match up with the larger powers like defending state champion Thornton Academy, John Wolfgram’s South Portland squad, and especially the exceptional group of Biddeford Tigers returning for Mike Landry. The consensus? Marshwood would get its comeuppance.

In this newspaper clipping from 1989, Marshwood’s Kris Glidden takes down Lewiston quarterback Steve Letourneau. Playing in Class A for the first time, Marshwood went undefeated on its way to the state title. Original photo by Deb Cram. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

In those days, actual social interaction formed opinions. And plenty of opinions were shared at the nearby Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, where its roughly 10,000 civilian employees included many residents of cities like Biddeford.

“My dad told me that Biddeford thought we weren’t going to even score on them,” said Edwards, the smallest of the offensive linemen at 205 pounds. “That’s what he told me. I believed him. Dad doesn’t lie.”

Wotton played into it, telling Edwards that he better stop losing weight over the summer because he’d be facing “300 pound guys every single week.”

Turned out Marshwood was the big team on the Class A block.

“That’s all the other Class A coaches wanted to talk about, how big Marshwood’s line was,” Lowe says. “And it wasn’t just the line. Abel Schultze (5-foot-9, 215 pounds) and Steve Knight (5-11, 195) were big backs.”

Even before they saw how they stacked up physically, the players knew they had plenty of talent.

“We were big and we were fast. We were strong. We were aggressive,” Schultze said.

“We all knew we had the potential to be something special,” Edwards said. “We had a stacked offensive line. We always did, all the way growing up. The running backs were obviously awesome. You really couldn’t ask for more. And, you had the past at Marshwood. You’re not successful unless you’re winning championships.”

Marshwood won its opener, 50-2 at Massabesic, a lower-tier Class A team.

Week 2 brought South Portland to the unlighted field in Eliot, behind what is now Marshwood Middle School. As Wotton would say later that afternoon, “this was the first test, so it was the biggest test.”

Barry Scanlon, now the assistant regional sports editor at the Boston Herald, was a young reporter at Foster’s Daily Democrat, located across the state line in Dover, New Hampshire. Scanlon would cover every Marshwood game that season.

“It’s a beautiful September day and the opening kickoff is seconds away, and I can still hear the voice. A South Portland kid screamed, at the top of his lungs, ‘Hey, Marshwood. Welcome to Class A!’ He yelled it so everybody on the Marshwood sidelines could hear him,” Scanlon said. “South Portland kicks off, and what I really remember is the violence of the collisions of the blocking. Well, welcome to Class A. Marshwood won, 20-0. It was a very competitive game, but the collisions on that kickoff are still so vivid.”

Convincing wins at Cheverus (44-14) and against Lewiston (34-8) followed.

Up next was Biddeford, which was 4-0.

The Biddeford-Marshwood matchup was covered intently. The Press Herald, along with New Hampshire’s Portsmouth Herald and Foster’s Daily Democrat, routinely covered Marshwood. Biddeford had its own daily newspaper. There were weeklies and TV reporters. The Boston Globe got in on the excitement, writing its own advance story.

“This game is totally blown out of proportion,” Wotton told the Daily Democrat. “The people having fun with this are the media and the local people in restaurants.”

By game day, Biddeford had brought its own bleachers to the field. Flat-bed trailers allowed fans to stand and watch the game above all the other people standing up and ringing the field. An estimated 8,500 fans showed up. The combined population of Eliot and South Berwick at the time was barely over 11,000.

Biddeford, a team used to playing in front of huge crowds at Waterhouse Field, had early jitters. At the coin toss, Marshwood won and deferred to the second half, and Biddeford elected to kick the ball rather than receive. On the first play from scrimmage, Biddeford had only 10 defenders, and Knight broke free for a 65-yard touchdown.

Marshwood went on to a 28-13 win. Knight rushed for a school-record 261 yards, cinching the game with a 70-yard score.

What the game showed – and Marshwood would continue to show – was that even though teams knew exactly what the Hawks were going to do, they couldn’t stop Wotton’s run-oriented offense that looked simple but required precision and timing.

“We had more plays, but we only ran about 10,” says Schultze.

The signature play was a double-dive. Gordon, the quarterback, would fake the ball to Schultze running between the center and guard, then give the ball to Knight, running between guard and tackle. It looked simple because it was executed with precision by players who had learned the play in fourth grade.

When games turned to blowouts, as they often did, Marshwood’s JV running backs would continue to churn out 5 yards at a clip.

“You might have a drop-off in terms of talent, but not a drop in knowledge of the game and what you were supposed to do,” Knight said. “There was no confusion, because we’d all been running the same plays since we were kids. That way, you can work on getting better, instead of working on the running back going to the wrong side.”

At the undisputed helm of Marshwood football was Rod Wotton, who died in 2021 at the age of 82.

Wotton retired as Marshwood’s coach in 1992 with a record of 220-33-1 and 16 state titles. In 1996, he took the head coaching job at St. Thomas Aquinas in Dover, New Hampshire, and over 15 seasons won 122 games and four New Hampshire championships. He retired in 2010 with a 342-81-3 record, at the time the most wins in New England high school football history.

To kids growing up in Eliot and South Berwick, Wotton was “a superstar,” Schultze said. Once in high school, they sought out ways to be around him.

“You were supposed to be in study hall, but, no, you went and hung out with him,” said Kris Glidden, the starting cornerback. “He would bust our ass in practice, but you still wanted to be around him.”

Glidden added, “You just wanted to play for the guy. You wanted to do well. And you wanted to be around him.”

While the 1989 seniors were in high school, Marshwood won championships in Class C (1986), Class B (1988) and Class A (1989). They lost one game in their high school career, and Marshwood went 96-5 in the 1980s.

Edwards said the 1989 championship “validated some of our past teams. Before we got there, they had some monster teams.”

Arthers went on to be a successful head coach at Belfast High, winning three state championships and six regional titles. Now retired, he still gets asked about his days on Wotton’s staff.

“I’ll say, ‘Listen, I spent seven years at Marshwood and we only lost two games, and one of them was to Wells in the West championship, and the other years we won state championships.

“Then I went to Belfast (as its head coach),” Arthers continued. “I used everything that Wotton did, and I’ll tell you what, it worked.”

After beating Biddeford, Marshwood rolled through its next five opponents, dispatching Cheverus 41-0 in the Western Class A semifinals.

In the regional final – a rematch with Biddeford – Knight gained only 37 yards. Schultze and Carignan carried the day in a 15-8 win. Schultze rushed for 117 yards, and Carignan, a quality runner at wingback, intercepted two passes.

The next week, Marshwood finished off its perfect season by beating Skowhegan, 26-14, on another sloppy field as Knight returned to form, running for 214 yards and scoring every Marshwood point, including a late 92-yard touchdown run.

When the game was over, columnists from Bangor to New Hampshire wrote about how the Marshwood team didn’t want their special season to end, didn’t want to take off the jerseys and helmets.

Even Wotton admitted as much, telling the Press Herald’s Lowe, “It’s been a great season but I’m a little sad right now because I know it’s the end.”