ESPN TIMBERSPORTS

After graduating from Paul Smith's College in upstate New York, collegiate lumberjack Adam LaSalle had it all: a degree, a job in Alaska working and competing in the prestigious Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show…and a berth in the finals of the STIHL TIMBERSPORTS Collegiate Series.

And then, he had a really bad weekend.

"I competed for Paul Smith's in 2006," LaSalle said, "and everything fell apart for me at the finals."

At the age of 27, LaSalle, who'd done a stint in the Navy before enrolling in school, was the oldest competitor in the finals, and he was beaten handily by a stable of young buck sawyers led by Jonathan Blais of McGill University in Canada and Gary Williamson of Oregon State University. But, despite the miscue, he didn't give up — at least not completely.

"I got a little discouraged, hung up the shoes for a little bit and went back to school…but then I got back into it," LaSalle said. "You put something on the shelf for a while and then something sparks that interest, something gets that wild hare going again, you know?"

Going back to school for LaSalle meant continuing his forestry education at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UW-SP), and sparking that 'wild hare' to get back into lumberjack sports was a deep-seated desire that LaSalle could only satisfy one way.

"I want to win," LaSalle said. "I take this seriously. Some people go out there and do it for fun, to have a good time and that's great, too. Other people do it for the cutthroat competition."

At the first of the 2009 season's regional collegiate forestry competitions — the Midwest Conclave held at Michigan Tech University in Alberta, Mich., in Sept. of 2008 — more than two years after the disastrous collegiate finals performance, LaSalle made his return to the collegiate circuit. What's remarkable is not that he showed up, but that in the process of bringing himself back to the sport, he single-handedly revitalized a program at a school that had been out of competition so long that no one at the school even knew what a conclave was.

"Basically, folks who have been here a while say it has been so long ago that they do not remember," Paul Doruska, professor of forestry and faculty advisor of the Society of American Foresters, explained. "The best guess is the last time we had a team was the mid 90's… so it's been a long time."

The "wild hare" that had caused LaSalle to throw his hat back into the ring had magically sparked the interest of several of UW-SP's forestry students — enough for him to enter a team of 10 novice lumberjack competitors in the conclave and to take fourth place out of eight teams with no one but LaSalle to guide them or to provide them with the necessary tools.

"Well, he was the person to initiate it, to teach us how to do it, to let us borrow his equipment from his previous employer," said UW-SP forestry team member Sarah Holt. "So he was really the person who got it going at our school.

How the forestry team came about was part serendipity and part cult of personality. It becomes obvious from talking to students and faculty in the UW-SP forestry department that LaSalle is the prime mover in the realm of forestry competition, but LaSalle's arrival at UW-SP happened to coincide with that of Doruska, the team's sponsor, who had a personal goal of bringing a forestry team back to the school himself, and had spent a few years trying to build interest among students.

"The spark to really get the students going was missing," Doruska said via email. "Then Adam LaSalle walked through our doors as a transfer student… the spark had arrived. Adam had a personal goal of winning the STIHL Collegiate Challenge; getting a timbersports team going was necessary to achieve his goal."

LaSalle's first move was to organize a teaser competition on campus that would pique students' interest and curiosity. "The Woodchuck Games," as they are now known, are a miniature version of the regional collegiate conclaves. (The first year, it was UW-SP versus the University of Minnesota, and this year, the University of Wisconsin-Madison joined in.) From that, LaSalle had enough interest to build a small team that he entered in the Midwest Conclave.

Showing up at registration on the day of competition, LaSalle was asked who would be representing UW-SP in the STIHL TIMBERSPORTS Collegiate Challenge events. Never having competed in a Midwest Conclave, LaSalle had no prior knowledge that STIHL TIMBERSPORTS would have a presence there, but his answer set up a chain of events that would give him another shot at the STIHL Collegiate Finals.

"I said, 'Well, I guess it's me,' because nobody else (from UWSP) had ever done this competition."

As the UW-SP team watched, LaSalle bested first the competitors at the conclave, and ultimately, the best competitors in the college field by winning the collegiate finals in Columbus, Ga., this past summer. LaSalle had gone from student to teacher and had gone a long way toward solidifying a new tradition at the school.

At this year's Midwest Conclave, the size of UW-SP's team was nearly double that of the previous year and LaSalle's protégée, Andrew Gollnick, came within a second of giving the school consecutive wins in the Collegiate Challenge, losing to perennial favorite Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. The school is even in discussions to host the Fall 2011 Midwestern Conclave.

"From not having a team at all to sending 18 folks to Conclave in about two years total elapsed time to now getting ready to host a Conclave in 2011 is simply remarkable," Doruska said, "and all because we were lucky enough to have Adam LaSalle walk through our doors."

And, despite working some six hours from his alma mater, preparing for his first year on the STIHL TIMBERSPORTS Professional Series and steadfastly denying that he's the coach, LaSalle was there to watch his team compete.

"We don't have a coach," he said. "We have a captain, we have an advisor and it's basically all of us teaching each other. I had the most experience on the team when it got started, and I taught everyone what I knew as best I could. I just can't honestly start a team up and spend a year with them and then walk away."