McDuffee dedication honors ‘vitality, leadership and courage’

A sports scoreboard rarely merits more than a passing glance. You check who’s winning, maybe the inning or time remaining, before turning your attention back to the action on the playing field.

Yet at its Bates dedication ceremony on Sept. 20, the new Morgan W. McDuffee ’02 Memorial Scoreboard attracted long, pensive looks — not for any winning score enumerated in its amber lights, but for its promise to become a campus symbol of loss turned to hope.

“Sacred spaces are often places of special memories,” President Elaine Tuttle Hansen told the audience of several hundred Bates and Lewiston-Auburn community members who attended the 4 p.m. Homecoming event at the Campus Avenue Field.

“We hope this place becomes a sacred space at Bates, a place that carries memories of Morgan McDuffee, a place to remember, think of, and honor Morgan.”

Captain of the Bates lacrosse team, McDuffee was stabbed to death on March 3, 2002, while intervening in an early-morning street fight near campus.

In May 2002, his Bates degree was awarded posthumously to his parents, who attended Saturday’s ceremony, as did McDuffee’s fiancee, Suzanna Andrew.

In the months following McDuffee’s death at the hands of a local resident, “Bates and the Lewiston-Auburn community could have turned away from each other,” said Peter Lasagna, McDuffee’s lacrosse coach.

“Instead, we decided to turn toward each other to create a permanent monument to his life force, a monument to love, community and cooperation.”

A fund-raising effort led by Lasagna realized gifts of nearly $21,000 from Bates alumni, parents and Lewiston-Auburn community members to install the Daktronics scoreboard along the northwest corner of the AstroTurf field, which is home to Bates varsity lacrosse and field hockey. Twenty-five feet wide by 10 feet high, the scoreboard uses LED lights (amber for game time and scores and red for penalty time and player numbers) and is topped along its entire length with a lighted garnet sign that reads “In Memory of Morgan J. McDuffee ’02.” Beneath the scoreboard, an inscribed granite stone in a flower bed honors McDuffee’s “vitality, leadership and courage.”

Project donor Ship Bright ’78 of Nobleboro, speaking at the event, said the tragedy of McDuffee’s death demanded a community response. “It was important to do something,” he said. “This project reflects the best of fund-raising because it honors the soul, spirit and passion a community can bring to a cause.”

For Lasagna, the scoreboard will tell more than scores and times. It will be a place to “say hello over and over again to one of the finest people I have ever known, a place that makes a statement about the heart and character of the people of Lewiston, Auburn and Bates College.”