IU women’s basketball’s game at Maine brings Mackenzie Holmes back home

Mackenzie Holmes has never been shy about where she’s from.

Whether subtly or loudly, she wears her Gorham, Maine roots on her sleeve every time she takes the floor for Indiana women’s basketball. The graduate student is a small-town product — Gorham’s population is a little over 18,000, more than four times smaller than Bloomington’s. She’s enjoyed a standout IU career, with a strong chance of becoming the program’s all-time leading scorer, but she was already a star back in Maine.

On Thursday, her worlds will collide. The Hoosiers are taking on Maine at Cross Insurance Arena in Portland, around 20 to 25 minutes from Gorham.

Holmes has been excited for this game since she found out it was happening over the summer, and her teammates are excited for her.

“I talk about Maine a lot,” Holmes said on Zoom on Wednesday. “For them (teammates) to finally get to see where I grew up — cause Portland’s very close to Gorham, and I spent a lot of time in Portland hanging out playing basketball. Just for them to be able to see something that’s really near and dear to my heart is really, really special.”

It’s not often a program like Indiana would schedule a game away from home against a mid-major team like Maine. This game is only happening because of the Holmes connection. It’s a neutral site contest, not a true road game, as the Black Bears play their home games at Cross Insurance Center in Bangor.

The Hoosiers played at Quinnipiac in November 2021, and that road date also had Holmes in mind. This one is even closer to Gorham.

“We told Mack when we recruited her that at some point we’d try to get her as close as we could back home in order for everybody to be able to see her play,” IU head coach Teri Moren said. “But I never think it’s a bad thing to go on the road, because it’s a different deal than being able to play in front of the Hall in front of 8,000-9,000 fans.”

This will be the first game the All-American has played in her home state since she graduated high school. Holmes said her father, Lenny, has handled the logistics of organizing the group that will see her play. She’s trying her best to treat this like any other game, but there are a lot of emotions associated with playing in Portland.

She’s spent a lot of time at Cross Insurance Arena. Holmes played several state championship games on that court in high school, and she watched even more games in that building. Teammate Sydney Parrish posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that she’d never seen Holmes as happy as she looked when the team landed in Maine Wednesday evening.

“I’m going to do my best to stay level-headed,” Holmes said. “Obviously, it’s very exciting in an arena that meant a lot to me. In my high school career, I spent a lot of games in there. But I’m just going to go in, not trying to overthink it, and I know that the staff, my coaches, my teammates will help keep me level-headed.”

Beyond Holmes, this game comes on the heels of IU’s big trip to Florida, where the Hoosiers knocked off Tennessee and Princeton. They had to show resolve in the Princeton game, as the Tigers fought back from a double-digit deficit to come as close as six points in the fourth quarter. Moren said that experience will pay off for her team later in the season.

“I think what I liked about (the team’s response to Princeton’s comeback) the most was that they didn’t panic,” Moren said after Saturday’s game. “They never looked panicked, even when we got them over to the sideline, even when we were going back and forth and we knew we needed stops. They didn’t look panicked. They didn’t look like they were pressing.”

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