They started in the same place, but Heather Hathorn and Maureen McHugh have taken different paths to where they are now: playing alongside each other as starting senior forwards on the University of Maine women’s soccer team.

Hathorn and McHugh began playing together at the under-12 level when they both moved to Scarborough the same year. A few years later, though, their paths diverged.

Hathorn went off to Loomis Chaffee, a boarding school in Connecticut, where she scored 23 goals her senior year and was a two-time All-New England Selection.

McHugh, meanwhile, stayed at Scarborough where she set the school record for career goals and received Gatorade Player of the Year honors.

Despite similarly successful track records, however, Maine coach Scott Atherley didn’t recruit the players with the same intensity. Of his courting of Hathorn he said, “Arguably, we’ve never gone as hard after a player as we did with Heather.”

McHugh was different. She’d had a successful career a Scarborough, no doubt, but she wasn’t playing against the kind of competition Hathorn had seen on the prep school circuit and that mattered.

“We recuited her, but it was the idea of, we’d love for you to come if you want,” said Atherley after the Black Bears beat Holy Cross, 4-1, in Falmouth Tuesday night.

She came and so did Hathorn, who chose Maine over both Boston University and Syracuse. That first year presented difficulties for both players. McHugh spent most of her time on the bench; she finished the season with two assists in seven games.

Hathorn came in with a lot of weight on her shoulders.

“I think I struggled a bit my freshman year. I had a lot of talks with Jackie (Gebhart), our assistant coach, but they were always really confident, very supportive,” said Hathorn, a captain this season. “They didn’t have a lot of expectations because it was my freshman year. I mean, they did, but they didn’t put any pressure on me, so they were really good about it.”

Even with the pressure weighing her down, Hathorn still managed to finish the season as the team’s leading scorer with eight goals and two assists; when the season was over she was named to the America East All-Rookie Team.

Three years later, everything is like it was way back when they were U-12s together on the fields in Scarborough. McHugh worked her way into the starting lineup midway through last season and is now playing alongside Hathorn, who became Maine’s all-time leading scorer last season.

“Maureen is a great story,” said Atherley. “She is somebody that has just developed from somebody that I had no expectations for as a first-year player to someone that’s starting as a senior. She’s gotten better. She works hard, she’s bright and she’s a great story in the sense of complete player development.”

As for Hathorn, well that’s a pretty good story too.

“I told her when I was recruiting her that she’d be the all-time leading scorer if she came to Maine and she’s re-written every record that you can imagine and she’s been everything and more than we ever expected – but not a surprise,” Atherley said. “And she’s just developed. She’s gotten better year in and year out, and I think the thing I appreciate most about her development is she’s a marked person. She takes a tremendous amount of physical contact and she has the ability and resiliency to really kind of brush that off and I like that about her.”

The Black Bears, won a share of the America East conference title last season, begin conference play Sept. 29 at home against Boston University.

“Each game we learn more and more and we’re just improving as the season goes on,” said McHugh. “And we find out more and more about our team and what we can do to make ourselves better.”

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