Tomlinson takes over Easton hoop post
By Joseph Cyr
Sports Editor
EASTON — The Easton girls basketball team will have a new head coach when the Bears hit the hardwood this season.
Rachel Tomlinson, Easton’s varsity girls soccer coach, is also taking over the girls basketball team after Dennis Anderson stepped down from the program. Anderson led the team for two seasons and compiled a 9-27 record.
“I was the junior varsity coach last year under Dennis and the position opened up this year,” she said. “There is only one girl on the basketball team that didn’t play soccer for me, so I know the girls pretty well.
This has already been an easy transition from coaching them in soccer now to the hardwood. They have actually made it very easy for me.”
Tomlinson added she was not overly concerned about going from one varsity sport to the next without a break in-between.
“Sometimes coaching back-to-back seasons for a coach, spending that much time with the same athletes gets redundant, but that’s not the case for me,” she said. “This is truly a special group of young ladies. They know how I coach and they know what I expect from them, so now all I have to do is let them play basketball.”
Tomlinson started coaching middle school basketball in Easton while she was still in college in 1999. After coaching the middle school squad for a few years before moving up to varsity for the 2002-03 season. She filled that post for just one year, as she left the area to attend graduate school in Iowa.
“[2002-03] was an amazing year coaching as the girls hadn’t won a game for four years prior to that,” she said. “We ended up with one win that season, but it was just like a state title game for those girls.”
Upon her return from graduate school, Tomlinson once again found herself coaching the middle school Bears during the 2008-09 season and then moved up to the junior varsity squad last year.
A 1997 graduate from Presque Isle High School, Tomlinson (her maiden name is Underwood) played basketball for coach Dick Barstow and was part of the Wildcat team that won the Class A state championship her senior year. She also played two years of basketball at the University of Maine at Presque Isle.
Her biggest challenge on the court this year will be finding the right combination of players to put on the floor at any given time.
“All the ladies are equally talented in their own way,” she said. “I just have to figure out who can contribute where and when it’s needed. Also, our lack of height is going to cause us problems grabbing the rebounds, so we have to use our quickness to make up for it.
The coach added she was looking forward to seeing her young charges learn to love the game the way she does.
“I believe everyone in high school, if they work hard enough, deserves a chance to play on the Bangor Auditorium floor, so I am pushing hard for the girls to get there,” she said.
