The five-member team also qualified for the championship in 2020, which was unfortunately canceled due to growing COVID-19 concerns. This year’s captains, Jennifer Fleming ’22 and Josef Komissar ’22, along with Danny Noenickx ’22, Taron Kui ’22, and Clara Walling ’23, will represent the buff and blue.
Fleming, who has been on the team since her first year on campus, is especially looking forward to returning to the championship. “We are wicked excited to have been invited to nationals this year and are looking forward to the trip! It is especially exciting since Taron and I were supposed to attend nationals two years ago, and we had no season last year.”
After attending three bonspiels, or tournaments, this season, the team currently sits 13th nationally. This year’s bonspiels brought the team to Harvard and MIT at Broomstones Curling Club in Wayland Mass., RPI at the Schenectady Curling Club, and Yale at Nutmeg Curling Club in Bridgeport, Conn. Hamilton’s Curling Club is based out of the nearby Utica Curling Club, where Fleming said that the Syracuse, Colgate, and Cornell clubs also practice.
Komissar is particularly proud of the team’s placement at the Harvard and Yale bonspiels, which earned them a spot at nationals. “I don’t recall our results from Schenectady, as they weren’t great,” the co-captain said. “But we placed second in the B events at Broomstones and Nutmeg, which clinched us a spot at nationals.”
Making these accomplishments even more notable is that no one on Hamilton’s team curled before coming to College Hill. “I had never curled prior to coming to Hamilton but was looking for something fun and different to try and ended up really enjoying it,” Fleming said.
The team has yet to learn who they will be facing in their pool at nationals, but regardless of the competition, Fleming expects the team to enjoy themselves and represent Hamilton well. “The team plans on having tons of fun and curling to the best of our abilities,” she said.
