Club Sports Feature: Woodsmen Mud Meet

Across Washington Street from Colby’s Main Campus lies a wooden sign with the inscription PV = nRT. This marks the home of the Colby College Woodsmen’s team. 

Every year, the team hosts the Mud Meet on their field, a springtime event that generally falls in early April. This year, Mud Meet fell on Saturday, April 9 and was the first Colby has been able to host in two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Participating teams included the University of New Hampshire, the University of Connecticut, and Dartmouth College. 

The revival of the event was celebrated by the Colby Woodsmen alumni, many of whom came out to support and participate recreationally in the meet. Joseph Savage, a current senior on the team, was surprised by the turnout of alums. 

“Normally we have 4–8 alumni ... but 22 alumni is something different,” he said. 

In addition to alumni, the team was joined by a number of parents, peers, and pets who came out to show support. The meet was kicked off by Colby College President David Greene and Provost Margaret McFadden doing a cross-cut, a traditional Woodsmen event during which two people work together using a saw to cut through a piece of wood.

Savage went on to explain the structure of a traditional Woodsman meet in more detail.

“Usually, everyone on the team has a singles event, a doubles event, and a triples event. And usually, we do singles, doubles, then triples, then team events, where teams are six people. And there are a bunch of different [events], like two-person saw, which is cross-cut, bow saw, decking, pulp toss, but this time we actually did the team events first, then all of the singles, doubles, and triples later in the day. Firebuild events are always at the end because they get messy,” he said.

The last event of the day was the team firebuild event, which is a relay made up of teams of five people from each school. The first four people participate in a relay, where one person has to pack a packboard with an axe, a piece of wood, matches, and a pan, and then run with it on their back through an obstacle course and pass it like a baton to their teammates positioned at various places in the woods. The last person in the relay joins the fifth team member back at the start where they work together to build a fire using the items in the pack. The first team to build a fire hot enough to cause soapy water in a tin can to boil over wins. 

The traditional events in a Woodsmen’s meet stem from the techniques used in the logging industry in the late 1800s to early 1900s. The Woodsmen’s coach, Dave Smith, explains more about the history and tradition behind these events. 

“A lot of these skills are ... not being carried on anywhere else because the tools that we use aren’t being used in the woods anymore for traditional or modern logging operations. There are still a few folks out there who chop with an axe or use a cross-cut saw for cutting wood, but of course, the vast majority of stuff now has transitioned even beyond chainsaws, going to mechanized harvesting equipment for large scale forestry operations,” he said.

Smith is in his thirty-third year of coaching the Colby team. He got started as a college competitor at Unity College and shortly after graduation started coaching at Colby. He explains the origins of Mud Meet, which was coined not long after he joined Colby’s team.

“We used to have our field located over near the steam plant and that particular piece of ground was always very muddy this time of year, and so when we would host our meet, we were pretty much guaranteed we were in the mud. So while this site isn’t quite as muddy, we do have mud ... And it’s spring; it’s mud season in Maine,” Smith said.

The Woodsmen team is a club sports team, which means it functions differently compared to a varsity sports team such as football or baseball. 

“I was at the student activities fair and we saw pineapples in the air and axes slicing through them, like Fruit Ninja but live,” Kate Braemer, a Woodsmen and Colby College Class of 2007 alumna, said. “I signed up and never looked back.”

Similarly, Hanna Hausladen, a current senior on the team, first gleaned interest in the Woodsmen team after witnessing one of their demos during the club fair. She speaks to the sense of community the team cultivates that enticed her to join. 

“I really liked the sense of community because it was so very different from the varsity sports communities that I had been exposed to thus far. It was… more about expression, who you are and how you are, and building on your skills and not ridiculing anyone for their lack of skills,” she said.

Colby’s team was one of the first to host a Jack and Jill meet amongst their competitors, which is a meet that abandons gendered divisions and has each school compete as one team. This was a change that came about in 2007, which, as Braemer explains, happened when she was a senior. 

“In terms of Colby versus other schools, I think we have more camaraderie as a team

across genders. Part of the push for us to make a Jack and Jill meet is that we heard that at other schools, the women’s team wouldn’t be able to practice until the men were done and the women would compete and the men wouldn’t cheer them on. And we were like, yeah, no because that’s not who we were and we were like, well, we’re gonna shove our ish onto everyone else,” she said.

Colby’s Woodsmen team placed first in the Mud Meet. The B-team also came out to perform, taking home first place in fire-building and fourth overall, beating Dartmouth who placed last. 

A list of Woodsmen events as well as detailed descriptions of each event can be found on the Woodsmen’s website at https://web.colby.edu/woodsmen/. 

~ Mahika Gupta `23