By Noah Stein
“Win or Lose, Be a Good Sport,” reads a massive banner hanging in the Rec Hall. The banner has lived in that building since it was produced by the cabin of Swamper 6 in 1941. Those words have become a principle we live by at Camp Nebagamon. Sure, it’s fun to win, and we have our fair share of friendly competitions during the course of a summer, but at the end of the day what matters to us most is building skills, trying our hardest, practicing good sportsmanship, and having fun.
Those words are ingrained in Camp’s culture and we try our best to live by them every day. Needless to say, when Louis approached me with some news a few months ago, I was shocked. He’d been reviewing scoring sheets from last summer’s Paul Bunyan Day and found some alarming discrepancies. To put it simply, things just weren’t lining up. Since then, the year-round team has spent much of our time reviewing and re-reviewing those documents, scouring last summer’s photos and video footage to understand what happened.
I regret to inform you that upon further review, last summer’s Paul Bunyan Day was riddled with scandals. (Though we can’t say we were impressed with the schemes we uncovered.) Consequently, we will be vacating the results of Paul Bunyan Day 2025.
In hindsight, we should have been able to tell that shenanigans were afoot from the beginning of the day. We ought to have known the tug of war rope had been greased when, in each matchup, both teams immediately lost their grip, sliding into heaps at the end of the rope.
We should have known something was amiss during the pushball finals, now known as Deflate-gate 2.0. We have since uncovered drone footage capturing two campers, adorned in Tom Brady jerseys, leaking air from the pushball the night before Paul Bunyan Day. While they believed this would provide a competitive advantage, they overdid it. With every push the ball morphed like Play-Doh, leading to one of the lowest-scoring games in Paul Bunyan Day history.
The fire-building contest was a disaster as well, and now it all makes sense. Usually, the first stage of fire-building is wood collection. That stage is crucial and also time consuming. Last summer, however, all of the campers apparently pre-chopped wood to get a leg up. As it turns out– unbeknownst to the cheaters– the logs they chopped were rotten. That led to the slowest fire-building contest since they attempted it during the legendary Paul Bunyan Day rain-out of 2000. We must be failing them if they can’t identify rotten wood.
We’ve uncovered more scandals than just the number of signatures on last summer’s extra Candy Line petition! Some campers attempted to get their hands on quiz bowl answers by stealing all of the question cards. This backfired when, after discovering that all of the old questions were gone, the quiz bowl staff developed new, more challenging ones. One camper moved in all of the bases ahead of the baseball field run to improve his time, apparently not considering this would have the same effect on everyone else’s time. A stealthy crew of campers even attempted to swap out the results card that we read when announcing the final standings at the end of the day. We were all confused when the card listed “Prairie du Chien,” a Grand Pursuit team, as the winner rather than Weyerhaeuser, the actual Paul Bunyan Day champion. At the time we figured it was a clerical error rather than the result of malicious intent.
While we were disappointed to find all of this cheating, what was perhaps more disappointing was the incompetence exhibited in each scandal. Along with, “Win or Lose, Be a Good Sport,” our other motto when it comes to competition has always been, “If You Cheat, Don’t Get Caught.” We talk all the time about how we live our values at Camp. Last summer all of you campers stomped on those values. Instead of winning or losing with grace, you cheated, and not even with the precision or effectiveness we expect from Nebagamon campers.
Starting in the summer of 2026, in the same way you all need to earn your Tripper rank in CNOC before heading off on a trip, you will be required to earn your Cheater’s Approved rank in the newly incorporated Competition Integrity project to ensure competence before you will be permitted to compete in either Paul Bunyan Day or the Grand Pursuit.
And if you still believe any of this, congratulations: you have earned your Gullible rank in Arrowhead-reading.
April Fools!
Of course our campers would never cheat… and if they did, they’d be way better at it than that.
Do we know where our summertime staff are? We sure do! We’ve assembled what will be a phenomenal team, composed entirely of folks dedicated to making this summer the best one yet for our campers. Before you browse through the list, please know that we’re still hiring for some positions: Nurse Assistant, CNOC (Campcraft) Director, Nature Lore Director, second session Community Counselor (mental health professional), and a few more Senior Counselors. If you’re interested in joining our team or know someone who is, please reach out to 
This spring, we’re trying something new. Our goal is simple: help send 10 campers to Camp Nebagamon this summer.
This month’s birthdays include…
