Break out the bats and gloves as high school softball season is upon us across the country, especially in the Pine Tree State. One of the tops when it comes to high level softball, Maine features several teams that are among the New England region’s best around and the regular season is officially underway.  

Taking over the No. 1 spot out of Maine is the defending Class A state champion Cheverus Stags, who are off to a 5-0 start. Who else is in the conversation, though?

Besides them, who else is among the elites when it comes to high school softball in Maine? Take a look at our Maine Power 10 high school softball rankings as we give you our list, as we see it.

When looking at what the Stags did last season, going 20-1 and winning the Class A state championship, we vault them to the top of our latest rankings because of the hot start. Addison DeRoche is the team’s ace on on the mound after a terrific 2024 freshman season. The Stags have notched a pair of victories over Thornton Academy and Noble by a combined 27-3 to start the season.

It’s hard to see how dominant the Eagles were in 2024, but ended up falling to Cheverus in the Class A playoffs. Windham only yielded nine runs against five different opponents. With the bevy of talent back in the fold, the Eagles will contend for a state title. Windham’s lone loss on the season so far is to the team ranked above them in Cheverus, 6-2.

We know the Golden Bucks didn’t finish the assignment of winning it all out of Class C, but this team boasts a strong roster and plenty experience. Expect Bucksport to be right there at the end once again. Scoring runs has been no problem for the undefeated Golden Bucks, compiling 94 over the first seven games.

Entering our rankings at No. 4 is last year’s Class C state champions, the Bulldogs, as they went 18-2 in 2024. There’s a lot to like about this team as they make a run at a repeat. Hall-Dale has looked good through its first six games, upending Dirigo twice, Madison and Mountain Valley. Lucy Gray has been solid on the mound, striking out 50 batters so far.

Honestly, Gorham could be higher on this list because of its first two losses coming against a couple of Rhode Island’s top softball teams. Since losses to nationally-ranked La Salle Academy and Cranston West, the Rams have rattled off seven straight wins.

Entering the rankings after a solid undefeated start are the Hornets of Leavitt. Reeling off nine straight victories, with every game except three where the Hornets scored more than 10 runs, this team has started things off impressively.

Having ace senior pitcher Isabella George returning to lead the way makes the Falcons a viable contender in Class B. Freeport has looked good out of the gates, out-scoring opponents 40-11 through four games.

Yes, Medomak Valley lost their first game of the season recently but it was a 2-1 decision against an undefeated Leavitt squad. We think the Panthers certainly deserved to make the jump into this week’s set of rankings.

There’s been little doubt behind why the Panthers are undefeated to this point and that’s because they’re putting up plenty of runs paired with steady pitching. The team is batting nearly .500 and freshman Lily Fortin has been impressive with a 5-0 record and 44 strikeouts.

The Lions dropped their first game of the season against Camden Hills, but is still in our minds one of the top clubs in Maine. Jordyn MacKay has impressed on the mound through nine games, compiling a 7-1 record with a 1.83 earned run average and 68 strikeouts.

Follow High School On SI throughout the 2025 high school softball season for Live Updates, the most up to date Schedules & Scores and complete coverage from the preseason through the state championships!

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— Andy Villamarzo | villamarzo@scorebooklive.com | @highschoolonsi

“Kissy face, kissy face sent to your phone, but I’m trying to kiss your lips for real (uh-huh, uh-huh),” Rosé croons as 24-year-old Jordon Hudson struts down the runway. She’s wearing an emerald-green bikini, a gold bracelet snaking around her bicep.

Hudson flashes a confident grin at the audience, tosses her hair, and turns on her heel to head offstage — but not before winking at her boyfriend, the 73-year-old former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. He’s seated in the front row next to his bodyguard, a Navy veteran who goes by “Dutch” and resembles a young, head-shaven John Corbett. Belichick doesn’t applaud. He doesn’t cheer. He just sits there directly in Hudson’s eyeline, chewing gum, looking very much as he did when the Packers beat the Patriots 27-24 on a field goal during overtime.

Hudson — and, to some extent, Belichick, and to a much lesser extent, Dutch — is in a strange position. She’s in the State of Maine Grand Ballroom at Portland’s Holiday Inn by the Bay competing for the title of Miss Maine USA, a subsidiary of the Miss USA beauty pageant. Hudson’s been on the pageant circuit for years, and last year, her first competing for Miss Maine, she was crowned first runner-up. This time around, however, is different. Hudson isn’t just Miss Hancock, the tiny Maine town where she was born. Thanks to her relationship with Belichick, she’s the star of the show.

A few weeks ago, there would have been minimal media interest in a small pageant held in a Holiday Inn conference room. Other than Hudson, the most noteworthy contestant was Isabelle St. Cyr, a statuesque blonde 24-year-old who made local news for being the first trans contestant in Miss Maine history. But over the past month, Hudson has been besieged by negative media attention. She made headlines after a Belichick CBS News appearance with Tony Dokoupil, where she sat in on the interview and repeatedly stepped in to decline to answer questions. And after the sports podcaster Pablo Torre reported that she had become so involved in Belichick’s career at UNC (where he’s coached since leaving the Patriots) that the university barred her from campus (which UNC has denied), reporters flocked to the pageant, camping out in the lobby to catch a glimpse of Hudson.

The pageant was a two-day event, starting with preliminaries on Saturday that included a private interview with the judges, an evening-gown competition, and a swimsuit competition. Finals, where the 17 competitors were whittled down to the final five, took place on Sunday; save for a brief Q&A with the top-five contestants, the show was virtually identical to the prelims, from the skintight dresses the contestants wore to the music selection during the swimsuit portion. (“Espresso,” by Sabrina Carpenter, played not once but twice during both shows.)

“We expected a few reporters, but nothing like all these big cameras,” the parents of a first-time pageant contestant said. “Whatever.” Others were similarly restrained in showing their annoyance. “All the girls know each other in this community,” the boyfriend of another contestant put it. “It can be hard when someone comes in and steals the show.”

Still, Hudson handled the mêlée with grace, waving and smiling at reporters as she strolled through the lobby, wearing an ombré blue off-the-shoulder sheath. During an interview segment on the second night of the pageant, she made a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the attention. “I’m feeling an immense amount of pride right now,” she said. “I’m hoping that anybody who’s watching this finds the strength to push through whatever it is that they’re going through and embody that hate never wins.” (She, like all the other contestants, declined to speak with any media.)

The Clemente Organization, which puts on the pageant, however, seemed less equipped to handle it. It banned reporters from taking photos or video during the show and prohibited them from speaking to anyone affiliated with the event. “Members of the press, please LEAVE so the contestants can have some PRIVACY,” emcee Sal Malafronte shouted at the end of the first night’s preliminaries as Clemente reps yanked stragglers from the room. “We’ve never heard them tell the press to get out before,” one mom of a former Miss Teen USA competitor told me, laughing.

The interest wasn’t surprising. As the coach with the most Super Bowl wins in NFL history, Belichick is a vaunted figure in Maine, and the nearly 50-year age difference between him and Hudson, whom he met on a plane when she asked him to sign her philosophy textbook, was bound to attract scrutiny. “They’re literally like royals,” said one Patriots fan, who happened to be in town for her son’s graduation and was trying to spot Belichick. Hudson briefly considered dropping out of the pageant, the Daily Mail reported, but she clearly thought better of it.

Following her near victory last year, Hudson seemed determined to redeem herself. “She wants to win,” a source familiar with the relationship said, comparing her drive to that of the famously competitive Belichick. Some attendees expected him not to show up, but he wanted to support his girlfriend, and following the fallout from the UNC story, it likely would have “looked worse” if he didn’t go, the source speculated.

Throughout the pageant weekend, Hudson mostly traveled solo or accompanied by Dutch, arriving at a “pizza and pajama party” clad in a floor-length, feather-trimmed purple robe. (She seems to have been quite busy: A source told me Hudson was not involved in Miss Maine preliminary activities, like a Valentine’s Day volunteer event, and during the finals she was the only contestant to not record a Mother’s Day message for her mom.) “All the girls were so worried about her,” one source told the New York Post. “They’re all friends and she’s been so quiet all week.”

But Hudson put on a solid performance during the first night of preliminaries and finals the next day. In an introductory dance number, she shimmied, clapped, and stomped at the edge of the stage. Though she stumbled slightly during the evening-gown competition, she looked regal in a sparkly purple dress. In the past, she’s chosen the “rich indigo-ish-royal-purple,” she wrote on Instagram, because it’s the color of the oyster bushel bags she grew up surrounded by (her father was a mussel dragger). She’d carry them around as if they were purses and made them into dresses for her Polly Pockets.

In the interview portion, Hudson promoted her platform of fishermen’s rights, which she’s always been vocal about. When asked what childhood moment she would want to return to, she talked about being on her family’s fishing boat in Hancock. “I think about this really often, because there’s a mass exodus of fishermen that’s occurring in the rural areas of Maine, and I don’t want to see more fishermen displaced,” she said. “As your next Miss Maine USA, I would make it a point to go into the communities, to go to the legislature, to go into the government and advocate for these people.”

Not everyone was charmed by her performance. “I don’t think she was anything special,” Julie Rose, a former competitor on the Massachusetts pageant circuit, told me. “She was low-energy. I wouldn’t look twice at her if she wasn’t Bill Belichick’s girlfriend.” Like many other attendees I spoke to, Rose thought the real front-runner was Mara Carpenter, a vivacious, willowy Cumberland County native and longtime pageant contestant.

Nonetheless, Hudson had a strong cheering section: In addition to Belichick, her father Heath was there for the finals, as was her friend Miss Massachusetts USA Melissa Sapini, who warmly greeted Belichick in the front row. After the finals, Laurie Clemente, the co-founder of the Clemente Organization, came onstage to embrace her.

The consensus among the beauty-pageant crowd seemed to be that there were simply too many “distractions,” as another source put it, for Hudson to win. After lengthy deliberations and a four-way tie delayed the final decision — the emcees awkwardly improvised a Miss USA trivia game to stall for time — Hudson made it into the top five. But she ultimately nabbed third place, with Carpenter winning first runner-up and Miss Bangor, a statuesque, deeply tanned blonde named Shelby Howell, claiming the Miss Maine USA title. “I wasn’t surprised she was third place,” the mother of a former contestant told me. “I think all the press really hurt her.”

Hudson appeared to take her loss in stride: Though the pageant organizer was seen comforting her after the show, she quietly snuck out with Belichick through a side exit just moments later. Most of the attendees I spoke with afterward seemed more critical of Howell’s win as a newcomer than of whatever impact Hudson would have had on the results.

“Obviously, there was outside media attention, but I don’t think we let that rattle us,” Kwani Lunis, one of the five pageant judges and a reporter for NBC 10 Boston, told me. The Clemente Organization “approached it the same way that they have done in the past and were able to ignore the outside noise.”

But as the pageant organizers quietly packed up Miss Maine USA promotional posters, the press loaded up their cameras, and the representatives for a wastewater management convention filtered into the Holiday Inn lobby, the reputation of the New England royals still hung over the event.

“Wait, Bill Belichick was here?” I overheard one of the attendees say. “Why was he competing in a beauty pageant?”

Years after Congress passed a milestone Farm Bill, an alliance of marijuana and health advocates are raising the alarm about how a loophole has permitted sales of intoxicating hemp products that appear on shelves with few regulations.

The federal legislation in 2018 legalized hemp, which is cannabis with less than 0.3 percent of THC, the main psychoactive compound in marijuana. But the sweeping bill that Congress may replace or extend by the end of 2025 did nothing to keep hemp-derived products from having higher potencies, such as hundreds or thousands of milligrams of THC.

Hemp-derived drinks, edibles and “THCA flower” have popped up in Maine via smoke shops, convenience stores and online orders outside of the state-regulated medical and adult-use market. Over the past year, members have increasingly noticed intoxicating hemp options with unclear combinations of ingredients and originate from out of state.

The fight between the hemp industry, which prefers the existing federal rules, and an alliance of cannabis and public health groups concerned about intoxicating, unregulated products is reaching Maine and other states. Lawmakers in neighboring Massachusetts and other states are looking at new regulations around the intoxicating hemp-derived products.

Maine lawmakers are not moving as swiftly yet, though they are looking at ensuring buyers of intoxicating hemp products are at least 21 years old while otherwise debating testing rules and how to handle the proliferation of illicit marijuana grow houses linked to China.

“It’s really a whack-a-mole problem,” said former state Rep. Patty Hymanson, D-York, a neurologist who served on a work group last year that formed out of failed legislation to regulate intoxicating hemp and that recommended a 21-year-old age limit for buyers while not reaching consensus on other policy ideas.

Joel Pepin, owner of JAR Cannabis Co., which has several retail stores in the state, said fellow shop owners have removed the intoxicating products manufactured out of state and that they failed tests for Maine’s acceptable levels of mold, heavy metals and other chemicals.

Industry members provided photos of a “THC Nerdz Cluster” for sale at a Farmington smoke shop containing 275 milligrams per cluster. Illustrating the potency of those intoxicating products, Pepin said he advises new customers to start only with a 2.5 mg to 5 mg dose.

The Office of Cannabis Policy under Gov. Janet Mills said the continued absence of clear federal policy on intoxicating hemp-derived products, or IHDPs, has left states “increasingly inundated with IHDPs that are unregulated, untested, untracked and easily accessible by minors,” spokesperson Alexis Soucy said, adding the office wants new regulations.

“While the proliferation of these unregulated, intoxicating products is first and foremost a matter of public health and safety, it also poses a threat to Maine’s regulated cannabis market,” Soucy said.

Intoxicating hemp products are “a major concern for public health and safety,” Matt Wellington, associate director of the Maine Public Health Association, said Friday.

“Young people are easily getting their hands on them, and sometimes people don’t even know the drink they’re buying at the convenience store isn’t a harmless seltzer but actually an intoxicating beverage, because they’re being sold alongside non-intoxicating products,” Wellington said.

State agencies in Massachusetts issued guidance in 2024 saying the intoxicating hemp-derived products are illegal, but enforcement that is left to local health boards has reportedly remained uneven. Lawmakers in Maine’s neighboring state are considering new regulations this year while also not wanting to hinder non-intoxicating hemp products, such as CBD oils or creams.

Sean, who works for the Mystique of Maine cannabis business and preferred not to use his last name for fear of retaliation from government officials, said the state must decide how to best regulate THC and the products containing it. He described suppliers of intoxicating hemp beverages and THCA flowers coming into his stores to try to get Mystique to sell them.

But Rep. David Boyer, R-Poland, an ally of medical growers who helped lead Maine’s marijuana legalization efforts and sits on the committee overseeing the industry, nodded to the state-level regulatory challenges by noting the proliferation of internet sales.

“How do you enforce that at the state level?” Boyer wondered.