Volunteers, coaches, families, and players turned Park Street into the center of Mount Desert Island for one unforgettable weekend.
Aug 03, 2026
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Paradis Ace Hardware.
BAR HARBOR—On the Park Street fields, the Marty Lyons Tournament begins with rock, paper, scissors to decide the home field advantage, but the preparation for the three-day baseball tournament begins a long time before with Google sheet after Google sheet and appeals for volunteers.
The Acadian Youth Sports event begins with coaches and sponsors and planning. It begins with pitches and plays practiced, scrimmages, and games won and lost.
It begins with planning and hope and care. And that’s what’s happened here on Mount Desert Island for almost 30 years now.
The snack shack opens. Cars arrive. Bats swing. The announcer, lately Jeremy Dougherty, gives each kid super star status for their time up at bat.
Across the street, at the volunteer-built Park Street Playground kids not playing climb on jungle gyms or swing.
There are official winners and losers of each game and of the entire tournament, but there is experience that happens in each game, each at bat, each interaction, each purchase at the snack shack, or romp into Bar Harbor to get food or ice cream or buy a t-shirt between games.
“We had 17 teams, nine in the major category and eight in the minor category compete for the cherished trophies come Sunday afternoon,” Acadian Youth Sports Board President Tony McKim said Sunday. The minor-league championship was won by Tri-City (Brewer) as they defeated Lincoln who came down to visit us. Old Town played Ellsworth for the major championship.
The minor league is 9-10 year old boys; the major is 11-12 year old boys.
”We have had countless volunteers working from Friday night until Sunday afternoon on three fields providing 22 baseball games,” McKim said.
When the Acadian All Star team lead off the top of the first in their second straight elimination game Saturday, they were tired, their coach Dougherty said.
“They were not tired from leisurely swims with the teammates, they were tired from eeking out a win against Hampden to move onto this game,” he said.
The Acadians led in the first, 3-0. Sunrise batted in six runs. Acadians tied it, back and forth.
“Sunrise responded with six of their own. Acadians tied it up at six. A few innings at a tie, Sunrise punches through for a 8-6 lead,” Dougherty explained.
That punch through meant a lot of hope might have dwindled.
If players lose the elimination, they are out of the tournament.
“It makes elimination games all that more dreadful. It’s eliminating more than tournaments hopes, but this entire season of life,” Dougherty wrote.
The Acadians, he said, were up against a wall. But the team tied it 8-8, going into the sixth.
“And final inning, things got intense,” he explained.
There were just three outs left. And the first two outs came quickly.
Then, number 23 came to bat.
“Shavi hasn’t been playing baseball long, but you can see the natural raw talent in his game. He’s the fastest player on the diamond no matter what team is playing. He’s shown some ability with the bat, but he really showed up when he smoked it into the outfield for a two out hit,” Dougherty wrote.
“Game on the line, backs against the wall. Shavi comes through again! Huddy Phillips comes up and spanks a shot to left, scoring Shavi to take the lead, 9-8 in the final inning,” he explained. “The bench goes wild. The parents go wild. The season lives on. For now. For good measure, Max continues to (be the) hot fire the Acadians were burning to drive in Huddy, and his elated face as he jumped across home said everything about what Little League has always meant to be.”
What’s it meant to be?
“Fun,” Dougherty wrote.
The Acadians lost to Lincoln on a foggy early Sunday morning game.
Summer has a way of announcing that it won’t stay long. Maybe that’s why people work so hard to make weekends like this happen. Because children grow up. Coaches grow older. The last game always comes sooner than anyone wants. But for one more August weekend, on three baseball fields in Bar Harbor, time slowed down just enough for everyone to believe there would always be another inning.
The Marty Lyons Tournament is a Mount Desert Island summer tradition and it’s a big one.
”The Marty Lyons Tournament is everything Little League should be and today’s games showed that over and over,” Dougherty wrote on Facebook. “Fun, laughter, banter, and sportsmanship. With some home runs, errors, sliding catches and punchouts mixed in there for good measure.”
It’s the sort of event that you can guess Marty Lyons would want.
Lyons was the executive director for the Harbor House for years and the founder of Little League on MDI. McKim took over that Little League duty about thirty years ago, but Lyons, he said, was a dedicated servant to children all over MDI.
Baseball is about winners and losers, obviously, but it’s also about support, the opportunity to have another chance at bat or to catch that random fly ball. It’s about looking after each other, too.
So, it’s about community and care. And that care is apparent every time someone cheers for someone else’s kid’s hit, every time someone volunteers to help, every time a kid books it home.
McKim said in 2023, “The event, although now exhausting to me at 56, lol, is wonderful to watch.”
McKim isn’t the only one who gets that good kind of exhausted.
Coach Dougherty wrote, “They are always so tired in the afternoon. The sun has been high for hours, but the fatigue comes from long hours on the diamond. Or long hours between games back at the campground or hotel, jumping in and out of water until their next game.
“However it happens, they are always tired by the afternoon.
“Mistakes come a little more often. The emotions right after them.
“But, they always pull through to reach the moments we wait for all weekend.”
Those moments happen for all the teams—not just the Acadians. It comes in a Lincoln grand slam, in a perfectly caught foul ball, in the beautiful strike-out pitch over home plate. It comes in a moment sitting in the back of the SUV having a snack brought from home, in petting a puppy that’s watching from the grass.
It happens again and again on the fields that were donated to the town to do just this thing: host community games and events.
“This is Little League baseball. In August. The end of the line for many boys every summer. The 27th Annual Marty Lyon’s tournament in Bar Harbor is the last tournament of the summer for most kids,” Dougherty wrote.
“For the 12 year olds that means the last Little League games before going to the big field. For the coaches and dads in the dugout, its often the last time they coach their sons. Its an exciting time that also comes with a lot of hidden emotion. Nobody wants it to end even when we all know it has to eventually,” he explained.
That’s the bittersweet part of the mid-summer event.
“Marty Lyons is the end for many kids,” Dougherty said.
For three days, Park Street becomes the center of a little universe. The scoreboards matter until they don’t. The champions take home trophies, but everybody leaves carrying something else—a sunburn, dirty cleats, a new friend, one perfect hit, one impossible catch, or simply the memory of hearing their own name echo over the loudspeaker as if they belonged in the big leagues. On an island that has always understood the value of showing up for one another, in ways big and small, and ways that allow a tournament like this to happen, that may be the biggest win of all.
The tournament also brought in a lot of teams from throughout Maine who went to restaurants and gift shops, McKim said.
The last out is always just a little too quiet. The fields empty. Folding chairs disappear into trunks. The chalk lines begin to fade beneath sneakers and evening dew. By Monday, Park Street will look like any other ballfield again.
But somewhere a kid will still be replaying the catch he almost made, or the hit that finally found the grass, and a mom or dad or coach will still be smiling about a game they’ll always remember.
That’s the thing about a weekend like this. The trophies eventually gather dust. What lasts are the stories people carry home.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
All photos: Carrie Jones/Shaun Farrar/BHS
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