Tiny Axe Thrower Interview: Ms. Marvel

I got the chance to speak with Ms. Marvel a day before we got to throw against each other in the Swiss Over tourney (a bracket I had absolutely no business being in) at Urban Open 2025. I learned a lot about her experiences in the sport, what keeps her involved in axe throwing, and my very first "this is off the record" moment -- which, for obvious reasons, you won't get to find out about. So here it is, my tiny axe thrower interview with Ms. Marvel!

Axe Badger: Okay. Your name as you want it to appear on the blog?

Ms. Marvel: Ms. Marvel.

And how long have you been throwing in? Where from?

I throw out of urban axes in Durham and I've been drawing since January of 2022. So about three and a half years.

Three and a half years. I think I started around there too. Maybe the summer of that same year. I'm not sure. This is the hard part of an interview. I have to decide if I'm going to make it a goofy one or a serious one. Do you have a preference?

Preference? I don't.

Perfect! So axe throwing oftentimes gets really repetitive. It's a repetitive sport, and yet we continually come back to it. You've been throwing for long enough I think I can ask you this question: What keeps you inside of this community? What keeps you in this sport since 2022?

There is this clear path of improvement you can have. It's not that you throw your first throw for a bullseye, then you throw your first perfect round, then you throw your first perfect match like 75, then you get an 81. You can still have so many other places you can go with it.

And things are always changing because it's such a new sport. I think that we get new skills to learn. And then I'm going to answer it this way because I have to, but also the community.

I joined it because I was trying to make friends. I joined a league trying to make friends after moving to Durham. And all of my best friends in Durham are from throwing now. Just it's a really good group of people

it is a new sport, so things are really flexible. Are there things that you would like to see brought to the sport, or do you think if you were like, "okay, ax throwing could do this to help make it more popular or to make it more known or expansive, is there anything that's ever occurred to you like that?

I think individual venues do this better and worse. Some venues do a really good job of being out in the community, just kind of the basics of social media and things like that. And others just don't do as well at that kind of thing. They kind of rely on the community itself a little bit more.

I think all the venues could stand to do a bit of both relying on the community while also doing some of the business-y things you kind of have to do to get your name out there. But it's a lot of money to do that kind of thing, so it's not always the easiest, but there's ways to do it. I used to be in marketing, so I kind of run into the same thing where I'm like, if this venue would just X, Y, Z, they could expand their reach and get more people in the door, things like that.

It does seem like there's a weird mix of people who get it, like Urban, obviously, because it's multiple Urbans and they support each other, in a way, on social media. They at least try. But I come from a venue that has four lanes, and doesn't really advertise axe throwing very often. We have a set community and it's up to the community members to try to bring in more people. It just seems to me like smaller venues could try it in a different way than larger venues. Larger venues could do more than what they're doing, but don't want to invest in that for whatever reason.

So, off the record.

[[It's at this point that I put my phone behind my back, and Ms. Marvel and I discuss a series of things. It was illuminating and fun. And our secret until I'm in the ground and become a beautiful cottonwood tree for some axe throwers to cut down and throw stuff at.]]

So you bring up something interesting: I love that our sport is open to everyone, and I love how there is an assumption of inclusion. It's hard to run into an axe thrower who's surprised by it. But I also wonder how much more axe throwing could do to create inclusive environments for not just women, but for everybody across the gender spectrum. What do you think axe throwing does well to open the doors to everybody and what do you think they could do better?

So I do think that having the individual women's tournaments (and hate to group people in women and non-binary, it's reductive in a lot of ways), but those kinds of events really help a lot. And then again, I think, this isn't to say that women are inherently less good than men are at the sport, but I think having leagues that are a little bit competitive sometimes tend to attract a lot more women, which is how you get them into the sport.

It has almost nothing to do with skill, right? It has to do with the baggage that comes from the nature of gender relations outside of an axe house - people carry all that weight inside of an axe house, too.

Creating events where that weight doesn't have to be considered as much helps people feel more welcome, and helps them feel more confident in what they're doing.

There are great throwers the world who are women or non-binary or transgender, but it's hard to be as skilled as you are when you're also dealing with the weight of society and all that stuff. So creating spaces that are safe in that way I think is really, really valuable.

It's really having those safe spaces and there are these amazing kind of homegrown communities. Like an Axe League of Their Own. Those [kinds of media] also really help elevate the non-male experience, because it's a podcast about axe throwing with a focus on axe throwing as someone who is not a guy. Even so, a lot of guys listen to that podcast.

Oh yeah, it's one of my favorite podcasts.

And that's not even mentioning the [Gal-Lee] sponsorship and all of the other support they create.

[[It was at this point the next tourney started, and we had to stop talking to each other]]

Is there anybody you want to shout out?

I want to shout out Mother of Cats. She's my axe-wife and Yoda, who's my best coach ever.