COALTON — Throwing a more or less fresh chunk of cow poop wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be, said Melissa Moore — at least not after the initial shock of realizing it was the real thing she’d be tossing.

“I thought it would be fake,” said the Boyd County Middle School teacher, one of three who gamely participated in the cow-chip tossing contest on the opening night of the Boyd County Fair on Tuesday.

No way. No novelty-shop plastic poop allowed — if there’s one thing there’s enough of at a county fair, it’s bovine byproducts.

Moore didn’t win the event. That dubious honor went to Ben Maynard, who teaches at Boyd County High School and, for what it’s worth, also coaches baseball.

The poop-pitching contest was one event in a not at all serious competition called the Teachers’ Challenge. Fair board member Jill McGlone, who is a teacher at Catlettsburg Elementary School, dreamed it up four years ago as a way for the educational community to participate in the fair and hopefully to provide some laughs for their students.

“Kids like to see teachers do silly things,” McGlone said.

All the schools in the three districts in Boyd County are invited to send teams, but so far only Boyd County has taken her up on it.

This year there were teams from the high school, middle school and Catlettsburg Elementary School.

Besides the joy of hurling cow poop with their bare hands, here are some of the other events those other schools missed out on:

Pepsi chugging, in which each competitor opens and downs an entire can of the carbonated beverage at top speed. The winner indicates such by upending the empty can over his or her head, indicating that its contents are completely consumed.

Mike Spears, who teaches at the high school, won that contest. His motivation? “I had to win. My principal told me I had to.”

Horse-saddling, just like it sounds: Since few of the contestants had equestrian experience, they received a quick lesson before they struggled with straps and buckles. “I thought it was a donkey,” quipped middle school teacher John Darnell, who won the event.

Trivia quiz, testing their command of fairgrounds minutia. Quick: How many barns on the fairgrounds? What’s the final event of the fair?

The high school team won that one.

McGlone said she tries to come up with new events every year and hopes the challenge will catch on with other Boyd County schools and in the Ashland and Fairview districts.

MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2652.