Portland High’s new athletic/co-curricular director is Spencer Allen, who for the past two years has been the athletic director at Sumner Regional, a 250-student high school in the small Hancock County town of Sullivan.

Allen, 31, is a Gardiner native and a graduate of both the University of Michigan and the University of Maine Law School in Portland. He said when he took the Sumner job in August 2022, “I thought of it as a good starting point, with my long-term plan to get back to the southern part of the state and get to a bigger school.”

He added he feels “absolutely” prepared to oversee athletics and after-school clubs at a school four times the size of Sumner, and in

Spencer Allen, 31, has been named Portland High’s new athletic/co-curricular director. The Gardiner native was the athletic director at Sumner Regional in Sullivan. Courtesy photo

Maine’s largest city.

Allen’s first official day on the job was Monday. He met with outgoing athletic director Lance Johnson, who is taking over the Thornton Academy job from Gary Stevens, who retired. Johnson had been Portland’s AD and co-curricular director since 2020.

“We worked on the transition plan to make sure everything is squared away for the fall. Want to try to make the transition as smooth as possible,” Allen said. “I’d like to meet with the coaches as soon as possible. Obviously at a school this size, there are a lot more coaches from the first team to the junior varsity to the varsity.”

Portland High Principal Sheila Jepson said Allen impressed the interview committee because he has been a co-curricular director (Allen oversaw both middle school and high school athletics at Sumner) with strong experience as a coach, and degrees in sports management and law.

“He has a strong background for this work and there’s a confidence about him to be in this role,” Jepson said. “And I think our committee liked how he will approach situations from a communications standpoint, that he’ll be collaborative as a leader.”

Jepson said that there were “probably a dozen qualified applicants,” for Portland’s co-curricular position and “we interviewed fewer than five.”

As a high school student, Allen played football, basketball and baseball at Gardiner, then was on the club baseball team at Michigan. After earning his law degree and taking a job in the private sector, Allen began coaching at Gardiner High as an assistant, doing one season each of football and baseball as a varsity assistant, and seven years as a varsity assistant with basketball.

While coaching, Allen said he decided “the best way I could affect the most amount of people was to be in administration. As a coach you might be able to affect the players on your team but as an athletic director, you can help affect an entire school community.”

In Sullivan, the middle school had just been consolidated into one new school. Allen said having to “build a middle school program from the ground up and being on the back end of the construction,” were valuable learning experiences.

Asked what challenges the new job poses, Allen didn’t hesitate to point out that Portland High is unique in that almost all of its athletic facilities are off-campus, city-owned sites that also have pro sports tenants.

But, Allen said, Portland High also offers what he was looking for in his career – the opportunity to positively impact a great number of people.

“My three years in Portland going to law school, I really loved the area and the main reason I got into this was to affect the greatest amount of students as possible. And a larger school in southern Maine, that’s just more people you can affect and help,” Allen said.