East assistant coach Blair Doucette reviews a play with the offense during Lobster Bowl practice Tuesday at Foxcroft Academy in Dover-Foxcroft. The annual all-star football game for 2026 Maine high school graduates will be played Saturday at Lewiston High School. (Rich Abrahamson/Staff Photographer)

DOVER-FOXCROFT — It caused headaches for his team for years. Now, Messalonskee’s Tatum Doucette gets to use the Cony football playbook to his advantage.

A quarterback for the East in the 36th Maine Shrine Lobster Bowl, Doucette will be getting plenty of snaps under center Saturday at Lewiston High’s Don Roux Field. His offensive coordinator? Cony coach B.L. Lippert, whose playbook this week is basically a carbon copy of the his regular playbook.

“I’m really enjoying learning it this week,” said Doucette, Messalonskee’s starter for three seasons. “Going up against them (in Class B North), I knew kind of what they were doing, so getting a chance to do that (myself) is really nice.”

With only five days of practice, players and coaches have just so much time to learn their playbook and establish a game plan. Yet for some of the state’s greatest football minds, the chance to learn a lot in a limited time is one of the best parts of the Lobster Bowl.

West quarterback Colin Moran of Bonny Eagle takes on a tackler during Lobster Bowl practice Tuesday at Foxcroft Academy. (Rich Abrahamson/Staff Photographer)<?xml version="1.0"?> Purchase this image

Lippert, Cony’s head coach since 2015, is known as one of Maine high school football’s great innovators. The Rams’ spread offense is one of the state’s most intricate, capable of taking on more looks than a department-store mannequin.

Such an offense can be difficult to learn in the span of several days. But the players who will take the field Saturday, Lippert said, have shown great capacity for learning the game, meaning the East’s offense will have lots of similarities to what Cony does on Friday nights.

“If we normally carried like 10 concepts, we might have eight in the pass game, and the run game is all the same,” Lippert said. “The advantage here is that the kids all have a pretty high football IQ, and they’re all being coached by some of the best coaches across the state.”

Lippert’s West counterpart is Bonny Eagle’s Kevin Cooper, another offensive innovator. Unlike Lippert, Cooper has elected to use more of a hybrid playbook that combines Bonny Eagle’s packages with those of fellow coaches on the West staff.

Although assembling and installing that playbook in limited time can be a challenge, it’s one that Cooper craves because of his personnel. He noted that players like Tres Walker (Falmouth) and Mason Henderson (Leavitt) can be used in so many ways, and figuring out how is the fun part.

“My tactic is to overprepare and have a lot of different things that you can do, so when you get to camp and see, ‘OK, this is what a kid can do,’ you can install it,” Cooper said. “Sometimes you dial it back, and sometimes you add. This week, I feel like we’ve been adding because the kids have been picking it up.”

Winthrop coach Joel Stoneton, who is also head coach of the West team, said his coaching staff spent a month developing the team’s playbook. Stoneton said the West players have not only been able to learn the playbook effectively but have also been able to execute it at a high level.

East head coach Dan O’Connell (John Bapst) said the skill level of his players makes the process easier. He also noted that many of the plays and concepts are similar from team to team — and even when new ones are implemented, that’s not a hindrance for players of this caliber.

(From left) East assistant coaches Kyle Bishop and B.L. Lippert of Cony and head coach Dan O’Connell of John Bapst oversee Lobster Bowl practice Tuesday at Foxcroft Academy. (Rich Abrahamson/Staff Photographer)<?xml version="1.0"?> Purchase this image

“The techniques and offensive packages have different names, but football is football,” O’Connell said. “If you call ‘pink left’ or ‘brown right,’ the kids might not know that, but they can catch on quick because they’re those kids that have been the alphas at their schools.”

As for the short turnaround time from the first practice Monday to the game Saturday, Lippert doesn’t see that as much of an issue. In fact, he believes a week of installation and preparation is better than the two weeks teams used to have.

“I honestly think five or six days is enough,” Lippert said. “If we were here another three or four days, I think it might get a little bit watered down, but right now, you have a sense of urgency to get it all in and get it cleaned up. I’m sure we’ll be a little bit nervous before Saturday, but the Lobster Bowl has it down to a science.”

Fortunately for both teams, their quarterbacks have added familiarity with the schemes they’ll be running Saturday. Parker Morin, Cony’s starting quarterback of three years, will be running his own system as one of the signal-callers for the East. One of the West’s primary QBs? Colin Moran, Cooper’s quarterback at Bonny Eagle.

“It helps when your OC is your head coach because it’s all stuff I know,” Moran said. “I think we’ve been keeping things pretty basic, but as we keep going, things start to click and make more sense. … We might have something that will (surprise people) on Saturday.”