FEATURED: Cutting their teeth

The unpaved road to get there leads directly past a ‘dead end’ sign.

There are no lights, no scoreboard and no concession stand.

The borrowed, weathered bleachers look handcrafted.

The feel of the place belies its given name, looking more like a campground than an arena. It is not competition ready just yet, but a few feet away there are people working to change that.

The small team that calls this arena home is huddled inside a large, hollow building, a mini-warehouse where they have been cutting and resizing tree stumps for the last few hours. They are college athletes, members of an elite program that boasts more national championships than any school in the country, but when game time arrives they will be a whole lot more than just competitors.

These men and women, along with a few volunteers and their unflagging coaches, will create and inspect nearly every instrument to be used. They’ll even hand-make medals for the winning team.

And at the end of their two-year college careers, it’s a near certainty that all of these athletes will wave goodbye to the sport and never compete again.

Still, if everything went according to plan, their lives will be changed forever.

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It’s been three years since Flathead Valley Community College hosted its once-annual Stumpjumper Days logger sports event, which returns to the FVCC Logger Sports Arena this morning.

Logger sports consists of, in the words of Bob Beall, who has been involved in logger sports for 50 years, “silly games that you play relative to what you do for work.”

If, of course, what you do for work is logging.

Events have names like the horizontal hard hit chop, obstacle pole buck, single buck and bonzaii logger, and all generally involve an axe — including the blissfully literal axe throw. Competitions are held using traditional logging equipment like a peg-and-raker cross-cut saw, the kind that hasn’t been manufactured since at least the 1940s.

The combatants, a misnomer if there ever was one, are part of a tribe of woodsmen and women who pride themselves on the craftsmanship and spirit of their sport as much as the results.

The sports trope about teams as family is exceptionally cliché, but it fits this sport better than any other descriptor.

Logger sports athletes, including the ones at FVCC, live as wanderers during the season, going so far as to camp together when they take road trips. This weekend, some visiting teams will make their temporary homes at and around the arena.

“It’s not motel or restaurant,” longtime FVCC logger sport coach Anne Beall said. “You’ve got to deal with everybody, K.P. (kitchen patrol) duties and cooking duty and prepping duty. Everybody has to pull their own weight.

“To see people that have never really interacted with a group before is a pretty neat thing. A lot of them, they don’t say two words the first year and by the end of it they’re part of the group and pitching in and talking to everybody.”

Call it exposure therapy for the shy.

“I just, I think everybody should be a part of a group or a sport. It teaches you a lot of life lessons, I think,” she continued. “Getting along with people, putting up with happiness, disappointment, all of that kind of stuff that goes with it.

“To me, that’s the neatest thing, to take people who have never had that opportunity and give them one.”

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The word that keeps coming up from people involved in logger sports is ‘camaraderie’. The relationships built between competitors last a lifetime.

Bob Beall, Anne’s husband, was a logger sports competitor at the University of Michigan and has coached the sport at numerous stops, including FVCC, for most of his adult life. He spoke of the connection not just between teammates, but all competitors.

“Within the competitions that we run, the other teams are not the enemy,” he said. “In fact, they tend to be best friends.

“We’ve seen numerous marriages between individuals from different colleges over the years. One of the reasons that we go forward is the whole concept of sportsmanship.

“I have friends that I first met when we competed, at the University of Michigan (in 1966), when we competed against Purdue. There are some individuals that I still correspond with.”

This year’s team captain is 25-year-old Erin McGowan, who’s a biotechnology major and fire lookout in the Bob Marshall Wilderness when she’s not competing in logger sports or serving in the student government. McGowan was married last fall, and her wedding had a familiar feel.

“Amber (Larsen), who’s (on the team) right now was my maid of honor,” McGowan said. “Audrey (Jones) was on the team as well as Natasha (Bennetts) and they were my bridesmaids, too.”

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The spirit of teamwork and sportsmanship will be on display today, although that’s not to say a score won’t be kept. And for most of the sports’ history, when scores are kept, FVCC winds up near the top of the leaderboard.

Getting them to talk about their success, however, makes pulling teeth seem like child’s play.

“My husband Bob and I don’t really care how we do, but it’s nice when you’re bringing some stuff home,” Anne Beall said. “It’s not required but, yeah, we have been successful.”

For FVCC, “being successful” includes 14 Association of Western Forestry Clubs national championships since 1986. That event, comprised of every school west of the Mississippi River, is the closest thing to a national championship. FVCC is the only two-year school to ever win that title, the only school to ever win four years in a row and, yes, they then went on to win for a fifth straight season in the 1990s.

Before talking about her program’s success, Beall first shared a different story.

“One year, Humboldt (State) showed up with all kinds of saws but they couldn’t pull them. The set wasn’t correct. They just weren’t going to pull. So we loaned them a couple of saws for the entire meet and then they turned around and beat us in one of the events,” she said, smiling and laughing at the punch line.

“You make lifelong friends. It’s not us against them. It’s not blood and guts. Everybody’s kind of the same type of person. It attracts a very nice type of person, for whatever reason.

“I really like that.”

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FVCC’s Stumpjumper Days begin today at 8 a.m. at the FVCC Logger Sports Arena, located east of U.S. 93 on Hutton Ranch Road (follow the ‘Dead End’ sign at the roundabout). The event is free to the public. The University of Montana, Montana State University, the University of Idaho, Spokane Community College, Northern Arizona University and FVCC are all scheduled to compete.