No clowning around; juggling club serious about 2005 season

When talking about juggling, the first thing that might come to mind is the circus. However, the participants in the IU Juggling Club are anything but clowns.\nThe Juggling Club has been around since the early 1980s and is still trying to rid the association of the circus that goes along with juggling.\n"When I am juggling, people come by and play the little circus theme song, but I am not part of the circus. I just like to do this," club adviser Dave Heald said. "They associate it with clowns, but they aren't very good. They just do it for the humor."\nThe Juggling Club meets at 9 p.m. every Thursday and Sunday in the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation building. There, the team works on different routines and tricks to help improve its skills and, ultimately, help improve the members' minds.\n"It aides in the critical thinking and learning how to analyze anything, not just what you are doing," Spanish instructor and club member David Wren said. "It combines that kind of thing with an intellectual development with physical skills."\nGetting started with the club is simple. The only requirement is an interest in learning and a couple of minutes of spare time. Even some of the club members had no idea how to juggle when they decided to join.\n"(Heald) gave me my first lesson. He told me the shape of my throw, and I eventually started to add some new tricks," Wren said. \nHeald has taken over the task of introducing new club members to the joys and opportunities that juggling offers.\n"I give a lot of the new members a brief five-minute intro to juggling," Heald said. "I show them that juggling can be done in a group or even by themselves if they choose."\nWith juggling being such an obscure "sport," some club members, such as Adam Ploshay, have humorous stories about how they got started.\n"I saw a guy in high school juggling some apples and I had a history paper to write, so I learned to juggle instead of writing my history paper," Ploshay said. "So my inspiration was the guy juggling and my motivation was procrastination."\nCurrently, there are only six members in the club. Despite no fee and short weekly practices, committee members are still struggling to find student participation in the sport.\n"Our main problem is that we are a low-key club. We don't get a lot of publicity because nobody knows of us," freshman President Isaac Simoneli said. "There are a lot of jugglers (at IU), but there is just a lack of interest."\nWith hopes of changing interest levels among students, Simoneli plans on having a callout meeting in the next few weeks. He even mentioned free doughnuts would be given away to any interested participants that attend the meeting.\n"I just need to get people there and keep them interested during the year," Simoneli said. "That was not done very well last year. I hope to change that this year"