WOODBURY – With dozens of sports offered at Nonnewaug High School, there’s still one that’s fighting for notoriety despite its many achievements: Nonnewaug’s Timber Team.
Timber Team, a group founded by NHS faculty member Andrew Zielinski in 2020, but due to COVID, the team didn’t actually start practicing until 2021. The sport brings students of many different backgrounds together for a wide array of events, including ax throwing, bow saw, crosscut, pulp toss, and log roll.
Even when the ground is still covered in snow, NHS’ Timber Team is hard at work preparing and training for the spring ahead by utilizing the open space in the mechanics garage of the ag building.
Sam Demarest, one of the two Timber Team captains, sees a fall season filled with achievements as a prelude to a successful spring season ahead.
“We are expecting the same effort and success from our team from the fall season,” said Demarest.
Fellow captain Elsie Crocco envisions even more team members involved in events once the season begins.
“We also expect more engagement from our teammates than in the fall season and we hope the other teams will stay competitive for the spring season,” said Crocco.
This spring season’s group brings a cohort of returning competitors, an advantage that should pay dividends this spring come competition time. There are however going to be several changes made to the Nonnewaug competition this spring.
For context, every year Nonnewaug has held their own spring competition during April and May. This year the competition will be held on May 20th behind the NHS tennis courts. The competition is set to begin at 4:00 pm after school; however, the preliminary rounds for the axe throw event will be starting at 3:30 pm. Since the Nonnewaug competition will be the last of the spring season, Zielinski wanted to put some fun twists on the events.
“I want to spice things up seeing as how we have the last competition of the season and many of our competitors and those from other schools will be graduating,” Zielinski said.
With this in mind, Zielinski hosted a senior-only meeting on February 3rd to discuss what changes could be made to the events and the group decided to sponsor axe throwing, log roll, and pulp toss for the upcoming season.
