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Middletown High School has been home to the state champion girls outdoor track team for the last two seasons, and now it has been confirmed as the home of a whole new species of champion.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources identified a towering Eastern Cottonwood tree on the school's campus as the state champion tree, after determining in July that it is the largest of its kind in the state.

In fall 2006, Keith Staley – a 37-year teacher who spent the last 32 years teaching agriculture education at Middletown – and his forestry and wildlife class invited Department of Natural Resources staff to measure the tree. The department sent staff members and announced two years later that it beat out all the other Eastern Cottonwoods in Maryland.

An 86-foot tall champion was announced, and now Staley will use the tree as an example in some of his forestry lessons.

"What we're able to do, first of all, is we're able to teach kids about the importance of trees both to the ecosystem, as well as their commercial value," Staley said. "In a few weeks we're going to be starting our outdoor plant identification unit, and this will be one of the first trees we look at because it's a state champion tree."

Records on large trees are kept as part of the Big Tree Program, an initiative which was originally started as a Maryland program in 1925 by the state's first forester, Fred Besley, and became a nationwide effort in 1940, according to John Bennett, volunteer coordinator for the Maryland Big Tree Program.

In order for a tree to be considered, it must be measured in a specific way, after which it receives a numeric score. Trees' scores are compared, and the highest score indicates the champion.

"We measure the circumference in inches at 4.5 feet above the ground," Bennett explained via e-mail. "We then measure the height using a clinometer or laser hypsometer … Finally, we take two crown spread measurements … We then add up the figures, circumference in inches plus height in feet plus 1/4 of the average crown spread equals total points." The Middletown tree's trunk was measured as 17 feet 10 inches at 4.5 feet high, and the spread of its crown is 98 feet at its widest. It scored 325 points.

"I've taught here for 32 years and I knew it was a big tree, but I had never seen the Big Tree listings," Staley said. "So when I saw the listings I thought it would be a good idea to measure the tree to see how it measured up against other Big Trees in the state."

The tree, estimated at 70 to 80 years old, surpassed all of them. Middletown High School's list of champions no longer begins and ends with the Knights.