Ben Kniceley’s pretty sure his dad had a good laugh after the Haywood Community College graduate came away with a national title in the June 20 STIHL Timbersports Collegiate Series.
“I grew up splitting wood and stuff like that with my dad, and he’d always have to force me to go out there,” said Kniceley, who’s from Shelby.
Not so anymore. Kniceley, 21, won the Collegiate Mid-Atlantic Qualifier, held in Cumberland, Maryland, this April, earning him a ticket to New York City for the national contest. There, he went against five other competitors in a slate of four events to determine who would come out on top.
That proved to be Kniceley. Competitors earn points for each event, getting six points for a first-place finish, five points for second place and so on. Points from each event are then added together. Kniceley came away with 22 out of a possible 24 points, taking first in two events and second in the other two. The runner-up, Cody Labahn of Oregon State University, had 18 points.
Kniceley’s win included a record time in the standing block chop, when he logged the fastest completion of anyone in U.S. competition during the 2014-15 season.
Pretty impressive considering that Kniceley had been considered the underdog against Labahn, said HCC’s lead forestry instructor Blair Bishop, but Kniceley “clearly, handily won.”
The ride isn’t over. In November, Kniceley, who now holds associate’s degrees in both fisheries and wildlife from HCC, will travel to Austria to compete in the 2015 Rookie World Championships as a STIHL-sponsored athlete. His accomplishment has also earned him a spot competing in STIHL’s professional series for 2016.
“I don’t know if it’s really set in yet, but it feels really good just to know that I accomplished something I was trying to do for four years,” he said.
For Kniceley, those four years started with an invitation from Andy Fitzsimmons, then his roommate and captain of HCC’s timbersports team, to give it a try. Kniceley was more of a baseball guy and had never heard of timbersports. That soon changed.
“I fell in love right then and there,” Kniceley said.
“It was kind of fun to me,” he added. “It kept me in really good shape and it was something to do. I can’t just go to class and sit around and do nothing.”
As it turned out, he was also pretty good at it. For the past three years, he’s chopped for a paycheck, working for the Lumberjack Feud Dinner Show in Pigeon Forge — since graduating in May, it’s a fulltime job, though he does hope to eventually move on to a job that uses his education as an associate’s degree holder in both fisheries and wildlife.
In last year’s regional competition for the mid-Atlantic and Southern states, Kniceley took first in several events and placed in even more. HCC student Logan Hawks won the thing, though, progressing to the national competition where he took third place.
But this, year, Kniceley felt, could be his year.
“I knew that some of these other guys had been doing it longer than I have and may be more experienced, but every day I chopped at least six blocks a day for a month-and-a-half, two months straight, so I knew that I put in my time,” he said.
Kniceley isn’t the only one who’s celebrating the win. He’s the third HCC student to win the national title in the 10 years STIHL’s held the series, the fourth to compete in the national event.
For a small community college, that’s quite a feat. And because the school lacks athletics like football and baseball teams that students more typically rally around, the victory is a shared one.
“We are a very supportive college that views this as something that is important and identifies that with our college and views it as our team,” said Bishop. “We don’t have a football team, we don’t have a basketball team, so it connects with it that way.”