The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
A hidden gem: Stumbling across Timber Sports in Northwest Corner
WOODBURY — Spring is that high school sports season in which clusters of newsroom sports writers used to agree “everybody plays everything all at once” in a season too short to accommodate reasonable coverage.
Years later, sports writers and athletes at many schools have dwindled — often blamed on the COVID years — but the intense schedule remains intact.
Woodbury’s Nonnewaug High School produced a living, rapidly moving picture of the “spring phenomenon” last Friday afternoon.
The view across its sprawling athletic fields from atop the near-cliff that overlooks them was a panorama of the Chiefs’ track and field team working out on its state-of-theart facility in one corner; last year’s Class M baseball champions playing this year’s run-away Shepaug leaders tucked next to them; and, far into the other corner, perennial Berkshire League softball contenders Nonnewaug and Northwestern battling for league position behind another Shepaug runaway team led by junior pitching phenomenon Amelia Jacob (one nohitter with 17 strikeouts, and another game with 15 strikeouts in a five-inning mercy-rule non-contest).
Surely, there’s a worthwhile story out there somewhere.
But a local features writer for a weekly newspaper rarely covers specific games because the outcome is old news by the time the story hits the newsstand. It’s the luxury of a more relaxed schedule paired Friday with the penalty of showing up too late for a regulation parking spot in the long, narrow lot beside Nonnewaug’s newish tennis courts, where yet another contest is raging.
One last spot seems to beckon at the far end of the lot. The car fits, but clearly blocks entrance to a small leveled-out field with the bustle of what seems to be construction activity, complete with heavy equipment.
It’s the entrance to a Hansel-and-Gretel sports writer’s fairy tale nestled in the woods.
“You’re okay there,” says a huge young man with lumberjack proportions emerging from a truck behind the last car in the lot. “If we need to get out, we can drive on the grass.”
The “lumberjack” is, in fact, Drew Zielinski, a mechanics teacher at Nonnewaug and coach of yet another spring sport, this one largely unknown to most sportswriters and, perhaps, only available in the Northwest Corner where many of the area’s Vo-Ag students come from actual farms.
“It’s Nonnewaug’s Timber Team,” Zlielinski explains as another fairy tale’s Narnia door seems to swing open.
The “construction workers” become six members — Roger Boham III; Hayden Osterhaut; Lucas Potucek; Nathan Hayes; Tommy Faull; and Chloe Walsh — of a 20person co-ed team helping Zielinski prepare for the season’s first meet Saturday morning.
Zielinski says Wamogo, the oldest in a loose band of area teams, started some 10 years ago as the first in the state; Woodland; and newcomers Shepaug and Northwestern will bring teams to join the Chiefs, now three-and-ahalf years old.
They’ll compete in axethrowing — sure enough, there are three large targets at one end of the field; two-person cross-cut sawing — all-girls, allboys and a co-ed event; log rolling, complete with a huge log on a raised track that now makes sense on one side of the field; and pole tossing — lofting a four-foot pole between two stakes for accuracy and distance.
“The boy/girl ratio on the team is about 60/40, but it depends on the year,” says Zielinski. “This year, we have a lot of guys and not as many girls. A few years ago, it was the other way around.”
Zielinski himself was on his college timber team at SUNY-Cobleskill, competing against area college teams, including UConn.
The sport seems unlikely to hit the CIAC’s radar for a while, if ever; then again, consider the modern range of Olympic sports.
Meanwhile, like a features writer looking for a story in a broad range of choices, the Northwest Corner’s timber teams seem to have the luxury of some flexibility, within reason.
“We go to state fairs in the fall and we’ll have three meets this spring, with all the teams competing,” says Zielinski. “We’ve been finishing in the middle of the pack.”
Woodland and Wamogo will host the spring’s other meets, with one of them at the Goshen Fairgrounds.
If you can’t find a parking spot, just get out and look around. You, too, might be amazed at what the high school spring sports schedule brings.
“Find me if you come tomorrow,” says Chloe Walsh. “I’ll look out for you.”