Bill Desmarais knows his team is the biggest question mark on the schedule for every opponent it will play this season. The Kents Hill boys’ hockey coach likes it that way.

“They don’t know any of my kids,” Desmarais said. “I’ve been around this league a long time. My kids played for Thornton Academy. I’m not new to the league, per se. I’ve coached midgets in the fall. I know a lot of these kids.”

Kents Hill, the private school 15 miles northeast of Augusta, has long had a boys’ hockey team that competes in the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council division. This winter, the Huskies have added a team to play against Maine Principals’ Association competition. The Huskies are in Class A, and some around the conference immediately dubbed them one of the favorites in the league.

“I have not seen them play. I have a feeling they will be the best team in the league,” Scarborough Coach Eric Wirsing said in an email.

In the early going of the season, its been a mixed bag of success and failure for Kents Hill. The Huskies opened the season with a 6-1 win over Thornton Academy, a traditional Class A power that won the state title in 2023 after finishing runner-up in 2022. Last season, Thornton advanced to the semifinals.

Kents Hill followed that impressive win with a 5-1 loss to Falmouth, another program expected to compete for the state title. On Thursday, the Huskies took a 4-2 win over Camden Hills, the Class B runner-up last season, to improve to 2-1.

“We didn’t quite know what they had coming into it. Obviously, we watched some tape from their game against TA, but we didn’t really know. So we just came up here prepared for anything, and it worked out,” Falmouth Coach Hogan Tracy said after his team’s win Tuesday night at Kents Hill’s Bonnefond Ice Arena. “We tried to ask around, but there’s only so much asking around you can do. There’s only so much you can know based on he said, she said.”

Creating a team to compete in the MPA made sense for a few reasons, said Kents Hill Athletic Director Becky Kimball.

“The last two seasons haven’t been fulfilling for our JV squad. Finding games within a reasonable distance was difficult. We were playing club teams, some teams over and over for games within a two-hour travel period,” Kimball said.

Last spring, the idea was floated to make the junior varsity squad an MPA varsity team. To do that, Kents Hill had to completely divide the two teams. In the past, players could move from junior varsity to varsity multiple times throughout the season. That’s no longer an option. If a player is called up to the prep school team this season, he stays there, Kimball said. The Huskies could not start practices until Nov. 18, along with the rest of the boys’ teams in the state.

“These are games I’d never be able to get on our schedule before,” Kimball said. “We were lucky to get one game a week last year.”

Kents Hill has competed in the MPA in other sports over the years, most notably girls’ basketball. According to the MPA hockey bulletin, Kents Hill’s enrollment is 216 students. In Class A, only St. Dominic Academy, a longtime hockey power, is smaller with 151 students.

There was never any question that the Huskies would compete in Class A, Kimball said.

“Rip off the band aid and go for the toughest competition. Let’s go all in,” Kimball said.

Desmarais, a longtime youth hockey coach and co-owner of the Maine Moose, which runs multiple teams for players ages 10 through 19, was brought on as coach. He was eager to lead the team from its limited junior varsity schedule into MPA competition.

“We’re trying to keep students three or four years and give them something to play for,” Desmarais said. “The JV schedule, I won’t say it didn’t mean anything, but they were playing random teams and games. Now we can have rivalries as things progress … Like everyone, we want to compete. I think we can be a top four or five team in this league.”

The Huskies’ roster includes 17 players representing four U.S. states and five foreign countries, including seven players from Canada and two from the Czech Republic. The team has two Mainers – freshman Liam Netten, a defenseman from Hallowell; and Liam Ross, a freshman forward from China. Through three games, Alex Wang, a sophomore forward from Ogyeonggido, South Korea, leads the team in scoring with four goals. Alex Gadbois and Antoine Morin, a pair of juniors from Quebec, each have three points.

“We’re fast, and we have a lot of skill,” Desmarais said. “We’re going to come ready to play every night and use our speed to our advantage.”

After his team’s win over the Huskies, Tracy noted Kents Hill’s speed and ability to create offense. Falmouth goalie Brandon White, a Varsity Maine All-State selection last season, made 35 saves in the victory.

“They’re very good moving the puck, getting it out of the (defensive) zone. They do a very good job of that,” Tracy said. “We got a little bit lucky out there tonight. They missed some great chances they had. Brandon stood on his head pretty well for us.”

Desmarais looked at the start of the season as a lesson for his team, the first in what he expects to be a season full of them.

“It’s the top two teams (Thornton and Falmouth) in the league, to open the season back-to-back. Shots were 37-36. An even game. We outplayed (Falmouth) sometimes and they outplayed us at times, and it came down to who got the bounces,” he said. “Brandon White’s a great goalie, arguably the best goalie in the state, and a great character kid. I wasn’t surprised at all with this. A great lesson for my boys, right? You’ve got to show up every night.”