Sweet Home’s Forestry Club took second place at the state forestry competition held Friday and Saturday, May 4-5, at Oregon State University.
Six teams and 112 students competed in the two-day competition, which included technical events on Friday, including first aid, written expression, demonstration speech, prepared speech, job interview, map reading, tool and plant identification. Physical events on Saturday included crosscut sawing, power bucking, choker setting, axe throw, cable splicing, pole climb, hose lay, timber cruising, log scaling, and compass and pacing.
Sweet Home had multiple placers in nearly all events, adviser Dustin Nichol said.
“Our team was anchored by two seinors, Macy Cockrell and Kristen Tolle,” Nichol said. “Macy and Kristen made up half of our 168 points. We are a young team made up of mostly freshman and sophomores.”
Tolle was named All-Around Jill and Technical Forester, which Nichol noted makes her the third technical champion from Sweet Home in the last four years.
“We have also had, over the past four years, one or both of the all around honors as well,” he said. “We have been very fortunate to have examples like Kristen that the younger team members can look up to.”
Tolle placed in the top four in 14 out of 15 events she competed in. Nichol said other team members who did well were Justin Wolfe, Kolbee Cirdell, Sequoia Stroup, Julie Morgan, Amanda Coonc and Curtis Froman.