From the karate club to the badminton club, the High School does a great job at offering students an opportunity to participate in lesser known sports, and beginning this year they have added another club to the list: the curling club.
This September, amidst the chaos of the annual club fair, the curling club made its return after being inactive for five years. Practices, coached by Gregory Eisenhauer, have already begun at The Country Club. The program involves several schools in the Boston area, both public and private, offering interscholastic friendships and opportunities for participants.
After watching past clips from the Winter Olympics, 9th grade physics teacher Dr. Jason Tong came across curling. It was simple: one person slid a stone across the ice, while the other two swept in front trying to guide it towards a target. Tong said he was instantly intrigued by the sport’s application of physics.
“It’s very, very physics-based,” Tong said. “I thought it was a really interesting example of a typical problem that we give to our 9th grade physics students. So, I started showing some videos about that in class.”
While Tong said he enjoyed reinstating the club, it came with challenges. According to Tong, since the club was not registered as a sport, several things such as transportation had to be self-organized.
“The first challenge is you got to get people interested. It’s kind of an obscure thing,” Tong said. “The second thing is I’m not sure what the transportation situation is getting over there.”
Former club member and 9th grade physics teacher Jack Reed, who also attended the high school, said his initial attraction to the club was the social element that it offered.
“What made me want to start was the community aspect,” Reed said. “It was a place to socialize and be friendly, meet people from other schools and play a game.”
Reed thoroughly enjoyed his experience in the curling club and said he strongly recommends that students give it a try. Freshman Fedor Chuprov, described curling as a friendly environment that maintains a healthy balance of competition and fun. Fedor said that curling offers an athletic environment while also playing to people’s various strengths and not focusing on what are considered traditional athletic capabilities.
“If you want to socialize more between schools and also don’t want a sport that you feel like [is] really physically demanding; curling is more about controlling communication than it is about outright strength,” Chuprov said.
According to Reed, the sport is a different experience from the traditional, ultra-competitive athletic scene at the high school.
“I know a lot of people are three-sport athletes now, trying really hard to get to states and all this stuff, and curling was never that place,” Reed said.
Tong also said the club offers a relaxed environment, where students of all kinds are able to engage.
“It’s an activity that’s physical, athletic, competitive, social and stimulates the mind a little bit. There’s strategy [and] skill. I mean, it’s got a lot of different things going for it, but it’s not this major time commitment that some sports are,” Tong said.
In this new chapter of the club, Tong and Reed hope to restore the club to its former glory. Their goal is to offer students a safe space where they can create new friendships with people from other schools, use strategy and call themselves athletes, even if they aren’t overly competitive.
“I hope that it goes back to the place it was maybe even before I was a student,” Reed said. “Not to win a tournament or to achieve some medal, but just that it’s an organized community in the way that it used to be.”
