Josh Keefe won a state championship as a sophomore outfielder on the 2001 John Bapst Memorial High School baseball team.
But it’s his self-described futility on the football field that has garnered the Veazie native national attention recently thanks to an article published on the popular Slate online magazine.
“I Was the Worst High School High School Quarterback Ever” chronicles Keefe’s football travails during three seasons as the starting quarterback for the Bangor-based Crusaders between 2000 and 2002, a tenure during which the team lost all 23 games amid the latter stages of a 41-game losing streak.
The 2003 John Bapst graduate now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he writes a blog and works providing career consultancy services. He shared anecdotes from his life under center as well as the thoughts of other quarterbacks who endured similar frustrations.
“I knew for years I had to be among the worst of all time and then I started doing some research because I thought I could claim it and that no one was really going to challenge me,” he said. “In a weird way it’s sort of been gestating for a decade, and now that it’s come out it’s sort of my own form of therapy.”
Keefe’s often humorous reflections also have proven therapeutic for others, based on feedback he’s received.
“At the time when we lost and for years later I just thought nobody else had that experience of losing every game at quarterback for nearly three years,” he said. “But now it’s pretty cool to see other people come forward with their stories and present them to me.
“It’s kind of like we have this weird little club of losing quarterbacks, and not that I had a lot of anxiety about it left because it’s been 10 years, but it’s nice to learn there are other people out there and for them to see that they’re not alone.”
Keefe won the starting quarterbacking job as a sophomore at John Bapst after playing wide receiver as a freshman at Orono High School.
Matt Clark, who coached Keefe at Orono in 1999 before taking the John Bapst job for a year in 2000, had grown familiar with his young quarterback while working for the Veazie Recreation Department.
“He was always a really good athlete coming up through, a small kid but a hard-nosed kid,” said Clark. “We just wanted to make sure he was ready. We didn’t want to put him in a position where he wasn’t ready for it physically. We wanted to make sure it was the right thing to do, and it turned out to be.”
Clark believes Keefe’s assertion of his status as the world’s worst high school quarterback can be traced in some measure to poetic license.
“Our offense struggled,” he said, “but even though he jokes about being the worst quarterback it certainly didn’t have anything to do with him. I can’t say enough about what he did when I coached him. He gave everything he had and tried to do exactly what we wanted him to do all the time.”
Keefe said his initial idea was for the article was to focus not only on the John Bapst losing streak but the program’s subsequent comeback epitomized by the Crusaders’ run to the 2008 Class C state title — a team that included his younger brother Dan.
“Originally I didn’t know what it was going to be about, I just knew it was going to be an interesting story, at least I thought so, about the John Bapst football losing streak and then the turnaround they put together,” he said. “I talked to players and coaches but a lot of it didn’t make it in because of the way I sold the article and how it came out. It ended up narcissistically being all about me.”
The evolving nature of that article was one element of what Keefe has learned while pursuing a writing career in the decade since he graduated from John Bapst. That included a 2004 internship at the Bangor Daily News and earning an English degree from Skidmore College.
“I’ve been trying to dedicate myself to writing and getting pieces published in real places, so part of that is thinking about the stories I have that people would find interesting,” he said. “When I really started thinking about it, the first thing I realized was, ‘Oh man, I don’t think many people have lost as many football games as a quarterback as I have.’”
Keefe found similarities between his writing endeavors and his quarterbacking career.
“Both are really about trying to persevere through trying and failing,” he said. “This is the first thing I’ve written that’s appeared nationally. Before this, the most-read piece I ever wrote was for the Bangor Daily News when I was 19.
“Now I finally feel like I’ve had some kind of victory, at least a temporary one. It would be a cleaner parallel if I had won the final football game, but if there’s one thing to take away from the experience it’s that you just have to keep plugging away.”
One by-product of Keefe’s Slate exposure was an inquiry from a literary agent.
“She was very nice, but I got the impression it was like a new actress in Hollywood being asked to meet with a producer and being told, ‘You can be a star someday,’” he said.
“But I realize that now the real work has begun. I’ve finally got this published and now I need to work to really find out if people want to read what I have to say.”
