Shepard Coyne, Max Sala, Merek Helvey, and Keegan Bloss are dual sports athletes at Noblesville High School. All four seniors play football, something you probably could’ve guessed by looking at the boys. But it’d be a pretty safe bet you wouldn’t be able to guess their second sport. These four are the racing members and founders of Miller Ball Tobogganing, the fastest sledding team in the Midwest.
Tobogganing is a rare and ancient sport, getting its start as a means of travel for the Innu people in what is now modern day Canada. It wasn’t until the 1890s for it to take off as a sport in the United States and Canada until it was eclipsed in popularity by skiing in the 1930s. This history only makes it all the more unlikely for these four athletes to find success in such a sport like tobogganing. Despite its decline in popularity, they started to work on the activity anyways, in large part due to the help of a local business owner in Noblesville.
“My mom made a ukulele with this woodworker named Geoff Davis,” Coyne said “He was born in Maine so he knew about the [National Toboggan Championship] and he actually competed the year before,”
Coyne reached out to some of his friends on the Noblesville football team, hoping to convince them to join his newly found racing team. Among that Initial group were Keegan Bloss and Max Sala who are still with the team today.
“I had so much trouble joining at first. My parents didn’t believe me when I first asked them. They thought I was joking,” Bloss said “[Shepard’s] mom had to reach out to mine to get her to believe me.”
Along with two other members of the football team, the group formed the MillerBall Toboggan team. For the 2025 National Toboggan Championships, however, senior Merek Helvy joined the team. He soon proved to be an invaluable member in the team’s pre-race preparations.
“Merek and his dad are really good at woodworking, and that’s been super clutch for us,” Bloss said. “You have to bend the wood at the front, and that’s really hard to do without cracking it, so you really have to know what you’re doing.”
Before the 2023 and 2024 competitions, Davis mentored the team by walking them through the long and grueling construction process. In 2025, however, the four NHS seniors are on their own.
“It’s so expensive and so time consuming to build a toboggan, and he works a full time job, so we’re kinda working on our own for the first time and just texting him for help,” Coyne said.
In order to cut down on the demanding labor, the team decided to use their previous sled from the 2024 competition. Because of this time saving method, they were able to focus on the more technical side of the craft, working this year to optimize their toboggan as much as possible.
“We took our old sled from last year and just bulked it up. Last year it was really flimsy and would bend really easily. We made some modifications, so it’s pretty sturdy now. Last Monday, Keegan and I were probably there a good ten hours,” Helvey said.
The boys estimate they each put in roughly 40 hours of labor in order to construct their toboggan each year. But that is the type of commitment needed to be able to hold your own at the Toboggan National Championship.
“Everyone out there knows what they’re doing. It’s like a religion out there. We’ll ask for help with strategy, and they just won’t say, or they’ll lie to you or something. It’s their Super Bowl,” Coyne said.
This competition stems from a very different sports culture than is seen in Indiana. In Maine, where the competition is held each year, tobogganing is a much better known sport than most anywhere else in the world.
“Like 90% of people are from Maine, and they all have their secret strategies they won’t tell you,” Sala said.
Despite being outsiders in the toboggan capital of the world, the boys found great success early in the 2024 competition, something they want to build this year.
“Last year, we were actually winning early on, but later in the day, the temperature changed, and it made the track faster. Won’t make that mistake again,” Coyne said. “This year we’re definitely trying to be towards the top of the student division.”
After all the team have learned about constructing a toboggan, the rules and regulation of the sport, and the intricacies of race day, their biggest advice to anyone interested in tobogganing really has nothing to do with racing at all.
”Get as many people as you can involved,” Coyne said. “That’s been the coolest part of this entire thing. It hasn’t just been us or our parents or our friends. We’ve genuinely made so many friendships we never imagined we would’ve made otherwise.”
