Building arm muscle and paddling on the lake is how some senior civil engineering students at Western Kentucky University spend a majority of their time. 

Since August, a team of 20 civil engineering students spent several hours a week preparing for the regional concrete canoe competition that took place March 31- April 2. This competition is a part of the Ohio Valley Student Conference hosted by the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati State Technical and Community College. 

WKU finished first place for the overall conference competition and first in the canoe competition. Now that the team has conquered regionals, it’s shifted gears to prepare for nationals. 

“It’s our Super Bowl, or America’s Cup, of civil engineering competitions,” said Matt Dettman, WKU’s concrete canoe coach. “Most major universities do this, so it’s highly competitive.”

Dettman began concrete canoeing at Clemson, then continued at Stanford as a graduate student. When he began teaching at WKU 24 years ago, he thought the project would fit well with the university’s civil engineering program and has coached the team ever since. 

“There’s all kind of engineering principles involved in building and designing a concrete canoe,” Dettman said. “It’s less about the canoe and more about the process of building a canoe, but the fact that it’s a canoe makes it fun.”

In the fall, the team begins training for competition by practicing technique, timing and turns with older concrete canoes or practice canoes. Each year, the team has to build a new canoe to use in competition. While some of the team is at Basil Griffin Park practicing paddling on the lake, other members are back in the lab getting the concrete mix ready to pour the canoe. 

Kayla Frye, concrete canoe captain from Nancy, says she’s spent as little as a few hours to as many as 30 hours a week working on the canoe. Last year, she spent her free time paddling for the team, this year she’s more focused on designing the canoe. 

The competition does not just involve the outcome of the canoe races, it also judges the design paper, oral presentation and final product. 

“With paddling, you’re just focused on paddling,” Frye said. “Now, I have the design paper, there’s parts of the engineer’s notebook, the academics and being involved in the actual (concrete) pours that I wasn’t involved in last year.” 

Preparing the concrete mix for the canoe can take up to three or four months of research and testing before even pouring the mix. Typically, the team will pour a test canoe before winter break and pour the competition canoe after break. However, this year they worked on the canoe until the day before regionals. 

“They finished it like the day before they left,” Dettman said. “It takes a long time. We test a lot of different concrete mixes. They try to do new things each year, and the rules change each year so we have to change the mix each time we do the canoe.”

Each year, Dettman challenges his team to do something it’s never done in the past. This year, the team members decided to use fly ash (a byproduct of coal combustion), which used to be illegal in the competition, so they had never experimented with this concrete mixture before. 

They also had the goal of creating the lightest canoe. When they poured their competition canoe, it only weighed 120 pounds, which concerned Dettman because the lighter the canoe, the weaker it gets. Instead of using this weaker canoe, the team opted to pour yet another canoe that was more durable.

“That was the biggest challenge we faced, having to pour a third canoe,” he said. 

The team has been prepping for its next competition by editing the design paper, continuing paddling and practicing the presentation. The next goal for nationals is to place in the top 10, Frye said. The team will compete in the National Concrete Canoe Competition on June 9-11 at the University of Texas at Tyler. 

“If you’ve been to a competition previously … you see what you’re up against and you want to win,” Frye said. “You have this mentality that ‘I need to be the best that I can be or do the best that I can’ in order to win this competition, so you just have to work as hard as you can.”