AUGUSTA — When their College of Maine at Augusta basketball groups scrimmaged from 2013-16, Jamie Plummer and Keith Chesley weren’t allowed to protect each other.
In November 2013, Plummer, a freshman, was getting set to start one in all her first school practices. The observe adopted the lads’s crew’s session on the identical ground, the place Chesley and his teammates had been simply wrapping up.
With the UMA girls quick on gamers that night, Chesley, a 6-foot-1 sophomore ahead, agreed to remain late and supply an additional physique. His project? Guarding Plummer, who, on the similar peak, was one of many tallest gamers on the ladies’s crew.
“We began joking with one another, and we simply constructed this pleasant rivalry,” Plummer mentioned. “After every week or so of observe, my coach mentioned, ‘OK, you guys have to protect completely different individuals’ as a result of we might get too into it and get mad at one another.”
Practically 9 years later, Plummer and Chesley are husband and spouse. They’re additionally the all-time main scorers within the historical past of their respective packages — and, on Friday evening, the 2 can be amongst 4 alums to be inducted into the UMA Athletics Corridor of Fame. The varsity additionally will induct Michael Haskell, one other UMA basketball standout, and former males’s basketball coach Dick Haskell.
Chesley, a Clinton native and the son of former UMA standout and present Lawrence Excessive Faculty ladies basketball coach Greg Chesley, arrived at UMA in 2012. He went on to complete his school profession with 2,119 factors, surpassing the earlier college file of two,029 set by Deon Cheers (2006-09).
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Since then, Chesley has continued to comply with in his father’s footsteps with a transition to the teaching ranks. He’s spent the final week on the recruiting path as a part of his new job as an assistant coach at Division I Virginia Navy Institute however plans to be in attendance for the ceremony.
“Once I received this new job, (coming again for the ceremony) was up within the air; I didn’t know if I’d have the ability to make it or not,” Chesley mentioned. “I actually wished to make it again as a result of my time at UMA was actually particular, and luckily, it’s labored out the place I’ve been capable of hit the recruiting path this week and can nonetheless make it Friday.”
He’ll be there alongside his spouse, who went from that starry-eyed school freshman out of Richmond Excessive Faculty to by far essentially the most prolific participant to ever don a UMA girls’s uniform. Plummer completed with 1,977 factors and likewise set the varsity’s single-season rebounding file with 349 as a junior in 2015-16. The Moose made the USCAA event her freshman and junior seasons.
“Making that event for the primary time was one in all my finest reminiscences,” Plummer mentioned. “We had by no means made it earlier than, and despite the fact that the event didn’t precisely go as deliberate, it was an incredible expertise. I additionally bear in mind the nice rivalry video games we had with (Central Maine Neighborhood Faculty).”
Between highschool basketball tournaments and their UMA enjoying careers, Plummer and Chesley have logged numerous hours on the Augusta Civic Middle ground. It’s additionally the place he proposed to her in January 2019 with Plummer’s former head coach and the varsity’s then-athletic director, Jennifer Laney, ready within the background to doc the event.
“He had advised her they had been simply coming to go to me there in my workplace,” mentioned Laney, who was additionally the marriage officiant for the couple final summer season. “He took her right down to the courtroom to play a recreation of horse, and I used to be hiding so I may take movies and photos. That’s when he introduced her to middle courtroom and proposed.”
In 2014-15, Chesley set what was then this system’s single-season factors file when he scored 674 in his junior marketing campaign. That broke the mark beforehand set by Mike Haskell, one other member of this 12 months’s UMA Corridor of Fame class, in 1986-87.
Haskell, who performed for UMA from 1983-87 after graduating from Erskine Academy, performed below his father, Dick, as a freshman and sophomore. The 1984-85 crew, which went 29-5 and posted a 14-0 file in Maine Small Faculties Convention play, was the most effective in program historical past.
“We had been enjoying video games in New York and all around the U.S.,” Mike Haskell recalled. “We even went up north to Toronto and performed some overseas groups. It was a fairly sturdy schedule for a comparatively small college like ours.”
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Dick Haskell, who’s being inducted posthumously, coached the UMA males for 15 years after being named this system’s first-ever head coach in 1970. He recorded greater than 200 profession victories and guided this system to seven MSCC championships, together with three in a row from 1982-85.
The ceremony can be held at 6 p.m. in Jewett Corridor’s Farber Discussion board on the UMA campus. It will likely be open to all who want to acknowledge this 12 months’s Corridor of Fame class.
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