The University of Idaho offers nearly two dozen recognized club sports teams, but few are as unique as the logger sports team.
Jonah Baker
At 10 a.m. every Saturday morning, a diverse group of students gets up and meets at the Pitkin Nursery on Highway 8 to practice chopping, ax throw, pole climb and more. The team is a close-knit group, led by Katie Anderson, who is a senior in ecology and conservation biology.
“We have a variety of College of Natural Resources majors, but we also have some agriculture and arts people,” Anderson said. “Most people that come to the team have no previous experience with the timber industry and I had never operated a chainsaw in my life before joining the team. It just looked like a lot of fun so I got involved.”
It is easy to see why the team takes such pleasure in the sport.
Few sports involve methodical destruction and shows of technique, but logger sports accomplishes both with ease. Casual observers would probably struggle to figure out how there are enough derivations of logging to support an entire sport, but there are plenty of events and history backing up Idaho’s team.
“Our events are often very unlike what people would expect. I compete in the obstacle pole, which is where we have two logs laid on top of each other crosswise and I have to run around them and climb up on the top log to cut the end off and then run back,” Anderson said. “We also do horizontal chopping, which is where someone stands on top of a wooden block and then has to split it from underneath themselves. There are more than a dozen possible events to compete in, so there really is something for everyone who is brave enough.”
Each performance by a team member gains points for the team toward a victory in the event, making the competition similar to that of track and field but with much sharper equipment and more wood.
“Individuals compete in their own events and score points for the team. At the end of each event, we also give out awards recognizing the best female and male competitors that come along with their own extra points, so it helps to have those really strong performers on your team,” Anderson said.
Logger sports certainly holds the appearance of a niche group, but the club is actually the second oldest on campus. Since its founding in 1909, the logger sports team has had a long and illustrious history of competing with teams from throughout the northwest for more than one hundred years.
Coordinating with teams throughout the northwest helps Idaho’s logger sports team to attain their potential and improve the club as they go along.
“We usually travel to Oregon State in the fall for an event, but most of our events come in the spring,” Anderson said. “We’ve traveled to University of British Columbia and University of Montana and we host our own competition here on April fourteenth.”
The connection with University of Montana’s logger sports team is particularly strong. Both teams trade notes on equipment and often borrow coaches and practice spaces. While Idaho’s team is not huge, they do make concerted efforts to reach out to fledgling teams and ensure that logger sports takes hold wherever there is interest.
A rigorous competition schedule and all the other duties involved with running a club sports team are a heavy load to handle by themselves, but Anderson and her team still manage to put together a strong recruiting pitch throughout the year.
“Most people think Highland Games or measuring games when they think of timber sports, but we do some more unique things that we try to highlight when we are recruiting,” Anderson said. “We like to do demonstrations with local groups and timber companies, but most of the time we try to convince people that they can throw an axe and destroy things for fun. If nothing else, it is great stress relief.”
While most club sports act as outlets for students to find exercise and enjoyment in sports they have long been participants in, logger sports offer an additional opportunity for career advancement.
“We work a lot with private companies, which is a great way for our forestry majors to make connections and get a head start,” Anderson said. “If timber companies know us pretty well, they almost always send us an application to get students from our team involved in the industry. One of our coaches runs a timber company here and in Missoula and almost all of his employees had some involvement with timber sports teams.”
There is much more to Idaho’s logger sports team than just chopping wood. That’s just one of the many fun parts.
Jonah Baker can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @jonahpbaker