Curling Club Prez to Compete in Nationals
Monica Walker (CAS’09) led her team to second place at the USCA Curling Junior Nationals.
Monica Walker (CAS’09) led her curling club’s team to second place at the USCA Curling Junior Nationals, held earlier this month in Seattle. Now she joins the first-place team as an alternate in next month’s World Junior Curling Championships in Eveleth, Minn.
“No one really knows what curling is, so it sets me apart from other people,” says Walker. The goal of this team sport, which is played on ice, is to slide as many granite rocks as possible onto the center of a target area.
Walker’s parents, immigrants from Scotland, are frequent curlers and introduced her to the sport when she was young. She would watch them play at the Nutmeg Curling Club in Bridgeport, Conn., near her hometown of Wilton. “I was always surrounded by curling,” she says.
Now Walker is president of the BU Curling Club, a member of the juniors program at the Broomstones Curling Club in Wayland, Mass., and part of the single gender President’s League, the club’s most competitive league. She and the BU Curling Club head to Broomstones each Friday for practice and games. “It hooks you,” she says, “because it’s so difficult to be good. It takes years of practice.”
Walker’s team has won the regional qualifiers and gone on to the Curling Junior Nationals three times. While she is disappointed that the team did not place first, she is excited about making the World Championship squad. “Hopefully I’ll play a little bit,” she says. Her ultimate goal is to compete in the Olympics. “Obviously it depends a lot on school, but I definitely want to continue,” she says.
Brittany Jasnoff can be reached at bjasnoff@bu.edu.