Learning to juggle

I started juggling when I was 14 years old. I was putting something back in my brother's room one day when I saw a can of tennis balls. He had just started playing tennis. He only kept it up a very short amount of time, but if he hadn't done it at all, I may never have gotten into juggling. Anyway, I saw the can of tennis balls and thought to myself "I wonder if I can juggle?" So I picked them up and made two throws and catches a few times, and then three. I thought that was kind of cool, so I kept trying it. My Mom was out for a few hours, so I decided to come up with some tricks and write a little routine to show her when she got home. I ended up "inventing" the half-shower, reverse cascade and maybe a couple other tricks. I was hooked after that.

At the time I was also volunteering at Mill Mountain Zoo in my hometown of Roanoke, VA. One day shortly after learning to juggle there was a special event at the zoo and I saw a juggler there. I was amazed at what he was doing, but didn't get up the courage to go talk to him. A couple weeks later I decided to see if I could find someone to give me lessons, so I picked up the phone book and found a juggler in the yellow pages. I called him and set up my first lesson. It ended up being the guy I saw at the zoo that day, David Bear Stuart. It seemed pretty surprising at the time, but Roanoke is fairly small and at the time there weren't many jugglers performing in the area.

David taught me for a while, introducing me to clubs, rings, devil sticks and diabolos and letting me watch his whole juggling video collection. After a bit, he ended up just getting together to juggle with me, not charging me for it any more. I looked to other places to learn new tricks at that point, like IJA tapes. I ended up reading "The Complete Juggler" cover to cover dozens of times. I juggled fairly consistently until my senior year of high school, when because of applying to colleges and working part time I just couldn't fit it into my schedule. Luckily, I decided to go to school at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY.