Oregon club wushu newcomers usually fit into two categories: They either come in with a martial arts background or they join with no relevant experience whatsoever.
Freshman Tommy Yang doesn’t quite fit the mold of either. He has experience—in dance.
Friday, Oct. 17, the Ducks hockey team will face Washington, the team’s biggest rival in the league, in the home opener at Lane Events Center. Each year, both teams square off in a brutal four-game series for the I-5 Cup.
Last year, Washington won in a shootout after splitting the series 2-2. The year before, Oregon took it home for the first time in four years after an overtime victory.
“We don’t play Oregon State in hockey,” senior goaltender Trevor Peterson said. “This is really our biggest rival. We have the I-5 Cup and that’s our thing, our big game.”
Unsatisfied with its brief time with the cup, the team has spent the last month releasing Youtube videos with the hashtag #TakeBackTheCup to pump up fans, and themselves, for the start of the regular season.
Dana Macalanda was always into martial arts. She grew up watching Jackie Chan movies and was enrolled into taekwondo at age 10. She practiced her craft intermittently until the end of high school. She continued with martial arts all throughout college and joined the wushu club, which didn’t seem like a far-off next step for her. Except it was.
Wushu is entirely performance-based. In other words, no hitting.
On paper, the Collegiate Wushu Tournament looked like a bust for the three University of Oregon students who traveled to the University of Maryland on Saturday to participate.
They kept getting lost. There were fallen sashes and forgotten moves during forms. None of them placed.
However, for freshman Elirissa Hui and sophomores Wing Ng and Kevin Lai, the trip was anything but a failure. Despite their rankings, they all found reasons to consider it a success.
The wushu club is living out a lot of sports’ worst nightmares. Its members have a dedicated team ready to train, but no coach.
And that’s just the way they like it.
Everyone has different reasons for joining club fencing. Some got into it by chance, some through a friend. Kristen Shafer, however, had very different reasons for fencing.
Because two years ago, Shafer watched the fencing trials in the London Olympics and thought: “I want to try that.”
Because deep down she wanted to be like the Olympians she had watched that day — even though she had never even held a sword.
Because she doesn’t break promises.
All Jared Gruen planned to do was watch. He never thought he’d actually put on the uniform.
Two months ago, the UO senior came to club a fencing practice to visit his long-time friend, team coordinator Holly Bishop, along with his girlfriend Kristen Shafer, who had joined the team in the fall.
“He came to practice one day, and I was like, ‘Jared, go put on a uniform,’” Shafer said.
Initially Gruen resisted.
After a 5-2 victory against UCLA the night prior, the three seed Oregon club hockey team took on the top seeded No. 15 Arizona State University Sun Devils where they fell 5-1. The loss meant elimination for the Oregon Ducks as ASU moved on to the Pac-8 Championship against the reigning champs, the No. 5 Utah Utes.
Three seed Oregon took on six seed UCLA for the first game of the Pac-8 playoffs held in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Ducks emerged victorious with a 5-2 win over the Bruins.
The win over the Bruins means that the Ducks will be facing the No. 15 Arizona State Sun Devils, the top seed in Pool B, tomorrow night for a spot in the Pac-8 Championship, where the Ducks had fallen to Utah the year prior.
At the beginning of the year, things were looking grim for Oregon club hockey.
The team was $13,000 in debt and risked having the plug pulled on their season.
Things needed to change.