Club has high hopes for recruits, needs high ceilings to practice
Windmill, Boston mess, tennis, half shower, Mill’s mess, the robot. Confused yet? The CU Juggling Club is home to the masters of these tricks and juggling concoctions.
“It’s a forum for learning. We definitely welcome beginners,” said Brian Lehigh, the club president and a junior chemical engineering major.
The club is a great way to hone motor skills, get a workout, procrastinate for an exam or even invent a zany juggling move.
“Right now we’re just a few people, but we’re hoping to get bigger,” Lehigh said.
The club, which is new to CU this semester, sees an average of five to six jugglers each meeting, according to club members.
Gordon Browning, club treasurer and junior mechanical engineering major, said juggling “helps you focus. It uses the same area of the brain as sudoku and patterns. And it helps me procrastinate.”
Although the club lacks a formal practice area, meetings are being held Tuesday nights from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the recreation center next to the ping pong tables. Lehigh hopes to find a permanent place for their meetings by next fall. They’re looking for a place with high ceilings, he said.
“It’s so hard to practice inside,” Browning told Lehigh at the beginning of this week’s meeting. “I almost broke our TV this week, and I did break our VCR.”
Club Vice President Dana Guber said she learned to juggle at a music festival this summer.
“I do a lot of contact juggling, fire poi, clubs and balls, even though I’m not very good at them,” said Guber, a sophomore fine arts major.
Contact juggling consists of rolling and balancing a baseball-sized ball on various parts of the body. In fire poi, the juggler holds a length of chain with a burning orb on the end in each hand and swings them using various techniques. The diablo, an hourglass-shaped tool suspended from a string held between the hands, is also popular with jugglers.
Kyle Breuning, an engineering open option major, said he once balanced a 7-foot ladder on his chin.
“Do you guys know how to pass juggle?” Breuning asked when he arrived at his first meeting. “I’ve always wanted to try it with three people.”
With barely a moment’s pause, Lehigh and Browning formed a triangle with Breuning, and the balls began to fly.
“Want to try it with four people?” Breuning asked.
Guber joined to make a square.
“I have it!” Browning said as he lunged for a misplaced ball.
“This is chaos!” Breuning said.
“This is Boulder. It should have a juggling club,” Lehigh said. “We just pretty much … juggle.”
