Meet Humanities Teaching Fellow and debate coach Trinette Hunter ASP’18
February 24, 2025
Two boys basketball captains are taking their game from Maine to the Ivy League.
BY IAN ALDRICH
Landon Clark ’25 still can’t get the game out of his head.
On Feb. 18, 2022, Clark was a sophomore varsity basketball player at Maine’s Bangor High School and his team, a sixth seed in the Class AA North state tournament quarterfinals, was on the cusp of a huge upset win over the two-seeded club from Oxford Hills. With just 3.2 seconds left in the game, Bangor clung to a two-point lead.
And then Teigan Pelletier ’25 took over.
Receiving the ball on an out of bounds play near his team’s basket, the Oxford Hills sophomore calmly sank a basket outside the three-point stripe to steal the victory. A dazed Clark sat on the court after the buzzer sounded and tried to process what had just happened.
“I remember seeing him hit that three and thinking, ‘of course,’” says Clark with a laugh.
It wasn’t the first time the two had squared off. On club and school teams, on the basketball court and on football fields, Clark and Pelletier had faced one another in numerous tournament settings. They weren’t friends, but friendly rivals. Pelletier’s mother even has a picture of the two boys as third graders playing one another in an AAU tournament.
But for Clark, that 2022 high school playoff game was a heartbreaker. And so, the following year, as a reclassified Fourth Former at SPS, when he heard rumors that Pelletier was looking to transfer to a private school, he put on a full court press to recruit him to Millville.
“There was no way I was going to let him go to another school,” Clark says. “Because he was just going to do the same thing to me. He was going to hit more game winners and I wanted to be on the right side of that for a change.” In the fall of 2023, Pelletier reclassified as a Fifth Former to enroll at SPS.
Over the last two years, Clark and Pelletier haven’t just competed closely as football and basketball teammates, they’ve also become good friends. In retrospect, it seems like an inevitable outcome. Both grew up in Maine. Both hail from strong, sports-oriented families — Pelletier’s parents played college basketball; Clark’s father is the head football coach at Husson University. Both play pass-catching positions on the SPS football team. And both are academically and athletically hyper-driven. They work out together. They eat together. And for their final year at SPS, they have connecting singles in Drury.
[Landon and Teigan’s] impact on St. Paul’s basketball and our team culture has been incredible. Both are immensely talented, smart players.”
— Coach Max Gordon
“Sports has a unique way of bringing people together,” says Clark. “We came here and became teammates. We’re two guys who want to win at everything we do. We know how to push each other and we’ve become good friends because of that.”
Pelletier agrees. “It’s been great,” he says. “Maybe it was a little weird at first because we had played against each other so much, but we both respected each other and what we could do. And now we’ve become kind of brothers in a way.”
Undergirding both Sixth Formers, says head boys varsity basketball coach Maxwell Gordon, is a drive for excellence that is infectious and raises the game of everyone around them.
“Their impact on St. Paul’s basketball and our team culture has been incredible,” he says. “Both are immensely talented, smart players — so they have helped us win a lot of games. Even more importantly, they are competitive, tough as nails and selfless. As their coach, I know that they will set the tone every day for their teammates — and with their talent and leadership, we have been able to beat just about anyone on our schedule.”
Landon Clark ‘25
Teigan Pelletier ‘25
Next fall, however, Pelletier and Clark will go their separate ways. Princeton recruited Clark to play basketball; Pelletier is headed to Harvard, where he will play football.
“My parents both work in education and being a student is always how I see myself first,” says Pelletier. “Coming [to SPS] I never thought a place like Harvard was a possibility for me. But I came here because I wanted to be pushed in different ways and now I feel I’m ready for it. I was talking to a [football] teammate of mine, Chris Ramirez ’24, who goes to Harvard, and he said St. Paul’s did so much to help prepare him for the next steps of his life.”
For Clark, the opportunity to play basketball at Princeton is a dream come true. “Ever since middle school I knew I wanted to play in the Ivy League,” he says. “I really committed myself to that idea, both athletically and academically. So, when that opportunity presented itself I jumped on it immediately.”
In going to rival schools, of course, Pelletier and Clark are coming full circle. Chances are they won’t root against one another quite like they did when they were younger, and you can be sure there will be some SPS pride flowing when they watch one another play their respective colleges.
“It would have been awesome if we could have gone to the same school but we’re going to get to be rivals again,” says Clark. “When he’s at Princeton, I’ll be at the game to watch him play, and when I go play at Harvard, I know he’ll be in the stands, too.”
