It’s a club thing
They’ll never earn a varsity letter, and new uniforms are often a bake sale away. But when it’s game time, UVM club sport athletes bring it with skill, a spirit of fun, and a do-it-yourself ethic. A survey of the joys and rewards of membership.
Will Hull '08
photo by Sally McCay
SEEKING FISHERMEN
Will Hull ’08 is a sophomore in business from Long Island, New York. When he found that there was no fly-fishing club at UVM, he decided to start one up himself.
How long have you been fly-fishing?
Probably about ten years I’d say.
Who taught you how to fly-fish?
Well, my dad bought me my first rod when I was probably about eight. I pretty much taught myself and watched a few movies and stuff.
So, why are you trying to start this club?
Well, I came as a freshman and I always asked people if they fished or not. I always wondered if there was a fly-fishing club, but there wasn’t. It was pretty much a way for me to help freshmen coming in who want to fish and are looking to make quick friends. It’s a way for experts to have people to fish with and for beginners to get the equipment to be able to fish. Just pretty much for anybody who wants it.
Has there been a lot of response so far?
Yeah, there has! We’ve actually got an e-mail list going of about 20 to 25 names. First meeting, we had about eight people show up. I get e-mails every day about it. I’m pretty much just trying to get the word out there.
Has it been equal numbers of guys and girls?
I’d say mostly guys, but there are a few girls.
Has it been hard to get the club established?
People think it’s difficult, but it’s really not. I had to find an advisor, but that was easy because I searched for fly-fishing on the UVM website and found like five teachers’ names. One guy was very excited about it, his name is Brandon Weaver, and he’s been great so far. Then you meet with the SGA, do the paperwork, and three weeks later you have a club.
Are you going to get funding from the school then?
We’re trying. Tomorrow I’m meeting with the finance committee. I’m hoping to get money to buy loaner rods for people who don’t have rods and other equipment, but we’ll see how that goes.
Are there actual fly-fishing competitions that you can get involved in, where you are competing against other schools, or is it more an individual type thing?
I just heard of St. Mike’s and Middlebury starting up fly-fishing clubs, so hopefully we can try to get something going with them, some sort of competition. That would be fun.
What is it that you love best about fly-fishing?
When you catch that fish, it’s totally different from spin fishing, because you work so hard to present that fly to the fish, and then once you do catch it, it’s awesome.
Do you make your own flies, too?
Yeah, I do. We’re hoping to have a few lessons. There’s a guy down at Classic Outfitters named Ray who might help us with that.
Will your club have a coach or is it more a case of everyone learning from each other?
We have a guy named Aaron who is a guide in Vermont who has offered to help us; it’s just a matter of whether we can pay him or not to work with beginners. But I’m happy to teach beginners, and so are a few other kids who know how to fish. Pretty much everybody can be helping everybody.
Interview by Corey Christman G’06
photo by Casey Gibson
THE GRADUATE
With two kilometers to go in the 2005 Elite women’s national championship race in road cycling, Katheryn Curi G’02 saw that her solo breakaway—a move she’d made some 13 miles earlier—would hold to the finish. A one-minute lead, two kilometers to go, the words that coursed through her mind were “Oh, my god. Oh, my god.” As rivals and teammates congratulated her, that mantra of disbelief was about all she could muster. And, months later, Curi admits that seeing a photo of herself, arms upraised as she crosses the line as national champ more often than not stirs the same: “Oh, my god.”
Curi’s road to becoming a national champion in cycling began with the UVM Cycling team. She joined up, initially as a mountain biker, while working on her master’s degree in counseling at the University. A member of varsity crew during her undergraduate years at Mt. Holyoke College, Curi was drawn to the team aspect of collegiate racing. She admits that being a grad student on a team of mostly undergrad guys made her feel like a den mother at times, but says she was impressed by the level of dedication and hard training her teammates put in, which rivals what she sees on the professional level with her current Webcor team. “They take these little, scrawny 18-year-olds and put them on a bike and now they’re throwing down with the big boys,” Curi says.
Indeed, the post-collegiate success of UVM cyclists is impressive. In 2002, Jessica Phillips ’00 took the same women’s national championship title as Curi. Kevin Bouchard Hall ’04 is a member of the junior national team and took the best young rider jersey at the Tour de Georgia in 2004.
Curi’s counseling career will have to wait a few years. These days she lives in Danville, California and balances life as a professional cyclist with work for Title 9 Sports, a women’s sportswear company. After a seventh place finish at the 2004, Olympic Trials, Curi has her eye on a spot with the U.S. team for Beijing in 2008.
SHINING MOMENTS
WOMEN’S RUGBY
First place in the 2004 Beast of the East Tournament held in Rhode Island.
EQUESTRIAN
Team regional champions five years in a row. Fourth in nationals in 2000. John Pigott ’05 wins the national Cacchione Cup in 2003.
FIGURE SKATING
Jonathan Hayward ’07 places first in the junior men’s short program in the 2005 U.S. Collegiate Championships.
WOMEN’S SOCCER
2002, an undefeated season leads to the Northeastern League Championship game. Playing in six inches of snow and a full-on blizzard, Vermont wins. Another championship follows in 2003.
WOMEN’S GYMNASTICS
Rebounding as a club sport after cuts in UVM varsity athletics, the team wins the national club championship in 2004. “People were blown away by us,” says Sarah Silverberg ’04. “They were like, ‘Vermont? Where did they come from?’”
ULTIMATE FRISBEE
Glory years, roughly 1987 to 1992, include consistent top 20 national rankings and three trips to the Ultimate Players Association college nationals. 1992 won-loss record: 18-1.
SAILING
Team takes second among 14 teams competing in the November 2005 Timme Angsten Memorial Regatta in Chicago. UVM sailing is a consistent force in the highly competitive New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association.
ROLLER HOCKEY
Cumulative record for 2002-2003, 2003-2004 seasons: 30-7-3.
CREW
Over the past decade, the team wins several New England Championships and advances to the finals at top regattas such as the Head of the Charles.
CYCLING
2000, UVM wins the Eastern Collegiate Championships in both road cycling and mountain biking.
TOUGHEST WORKOUT?
CREW
“Every morning we’re on the water at 5:30 a.m., which is hard in itself. We also do workouts on the rowing machines that are extremely difficult. People will throw up and fall off when finished. There are a lot of things that we do that hurt. It’s part of the sport.”
Sarah Robyn Tousignant ’06
TRIATHLON
“Beach workouts normally occur down in Lake Champlain in the warmer months. It usually consists of swim/run intervals at the beach as well as sand sprints, push-ups, sit-ups, and running in knee-deep water. The stations of workouts are usually
dictated by who can come up with the more hardcore idea.”
David Bradford McAndrew ’06
WOMEN’S RUGBY
“The 80-minute game. No subs.”
Mary Brock Wrigley ’06
GREENHORN
From novice to old hand
Tacking, jibing, pulling sheets, keeping a keen eye for the elusive “puff”—competitive sailing can present a daunting learning curve of new skills, not to mention vocabulary, for a neophyte. Heidi Denton ’07 joined UVM Sailing in the fall semester of her freshman year as the one-person “crew” in a two-person boat. With the “skipper” she teamed with and coach Justin Assad as teachers, Denton steadily grew more familiar and comfortable with the life aquatic.
Then came the team’s spring break training trip to Florida. “It finally clicked,” she says. “Spending a week in the boat, basically from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., with my skipper—my improvement was amazing. Most people on the team are used to the drills and hate them, but for me it was really nice just to be able to spend a lot of time tacking, a lot of time jibing, and just getting all of the skills.”
Growing up in Juneau, Alaska, participating in sports and being on a team was always a part of life for Denton. Alpine skiing was her prime passion and she enrolled at UVM with thoughts of joining the varsity, but her nursing major would have been a difficult mesh with ski training.
Finding her way to a new sport and new friends through sailing has proven an essential outlet during the energetic Denton’s undergraduate years. Small, quick, and strong, she’s proven herself as an able crew and discovered her love for “just being on the water.” Asked to sum up sailing’s greatest rewards, though, Denton says, “The best thing about being on the team is the team. I’ve always loved teams and the people on them.”
ANIMAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
Jo and Mel Parent are talking about how they balance their studies with a good 30 hours a week dedicated to training and competition with the UVM Dressage Club. As if to illustrate Mel’s point that horses are never far from her thoughts, her horse, Baya, playfully and persistently tugs at the drawstring of her blue jacket. After starting college at Suffolk University in Boston, Mel was frustrated that she couldn’t ride. Getting that chance was key to her decision to join her sister at UVM. “I couldn’t imagine school without a horse,” says Jo. The sisters started dressage in high school as a way to improve their riding. In college, it’s both a good mesh with their academics—Mel is a pre-vet major; Jo, an animal science minor—and sometimes a welcome chance to just leave the books behind and ride.
PIONEERS
How two determined rowers floated a team
Elaine Soderstrom Anderson ’87 and Heather Smith Martin ’87 both arrived at UVM with experience in crew and hopes to keep rowing during college. One problem, it wasn’t a Vermont sport—varsity or club. Or maybe it wasn’t a problem. Anderson says that the desire to row is an undeniable force: “Once people have done crew, it’s just in them. We were willing to do anything to get it going.”
That’s not a surprising attitude, perhaps, from a group of folks inclined to put in hours on one of the loneliest pieces of equipment in the gym. It would take a good deal of oarswomanly grit to get the job done. They were told that the weather was too cold, the season too short, the boats too expensive. “We got shut down so many times from all angles,” Anderson says. “We really fought hard to get it a club sport—pushing, pushing.”
The push started with the classic campus communications tools—flyers and bulletin boards—through which they quickly rounded up some 30 like-minded souls who began to train like a crew team, though they lacked critical equipment, like a boat. But they practiced —running stairs, working the rowing machines, hitting the weight room.
Steadily, they began to move upstream. Their first boat was a hand-me-down from Dartmouth. They found a stalwart advisor and coach in Geology Professor Charlotte Mehrtens, a rower during grad school at the University of Chicago. Gordon Thom, a farmer in Milton, gave the nod to providing river access on his farm, where the fledgling team built a dock and a rough boathouse on a perfect spot—three miles of quiet, protected water from Lake Champlain.
Crew has gone on to become one of UVM’s strongest club sports in terms of both participation and performance. The students who make the early morning drive up to the Lamoille these days are training to compete against other schools. It’s a privilege that Anderson and Martin didn’t quite achieve in the start-up years. Still, they made their own reward. They got to row.
SIGN LANGUAGE
“We have a VT symbol we make by forming our fingers into a V and a T. Coming home from the national championships, we were about half the occupancy of this little puddle-jumping plane. As we landed, we began making the symbol, chanting Vermont, and cheering. The rest of the plane’s passengers, who up to that point had not been super-friendly, joined in. It was awesome.”
—Megan Elizabeth Kiernan ’06
Women’s Soccer club
(for UVM staff)