On Saturday the US Boomerang National Championships took place at Lake Stevens Community Park.
You read that right. US Boomerang National Championships.
I’ve been involved in sports journalism for 25 years now, and over those years I thought I’d written about pretty much every sport. But oh how wrong I was.
Since becoming the Herald’s community sports reporter in February of 2017, I’ve written about specific sports for the first time more often than I probably did in the previous 20 years combined. The most recent of those is competitive boomerang throwing, as I did the story about the US Boomerang National Championships coming to town. Not only had I never written about competitive boomerang throwing before, I never even knew it was a sport prior to receiving the press release put out by the Snohomish County Sports Commission about the championships coming to Lake Stevens. Writing that story was a complete learning process for me.
And that’s been far from the only time something like this has happened.
What other sports have I written about in the past 16 months that I’d never heard of prior to writing the story about them? How about flowboarding, which is performing tricks on a board while riding on an indoor wave machine? Or what about orienteering, which is a cross between cross country running and a treasure hunt?
And those aren’t the only ones. Beach handball and drone racing are sports I didn’t know about until I wrote about them. There’s also been sports I knew about previously, but had never written about before, like curling and roller derby. Yep, writing about community sports is definitely different from being on the Silvertips beat.
But it’s been both educational and fun finding out about these non-mainstream sports, and some of them I’ve even had a chance of trying out myself.
Not all of these can easily be tried locally, but a lot of them are. There’s a FlowRider at the Snohomish Aquatic Center that anyone can go try (there’s a USA Flow Tour event in Snohomish this Saturday). The Cascade Orienteering Club has an event coming up at Everett’s Forest Park on July 18. And the Granite Curling Club, located just across the county border in north Seattle, holds regular open houses.
I’ve already ridden the FlowRider and curled. I plan on trying out orienteering and boomerang throwing at some point. How about you? Which unusual sport would you be most interested in trying out? Vote here:
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
