“I probably unicycle more than I walk every day,” architecture junior and unicycle club president Zach Strassberg-Phillips said.
A recent video of the unicycle club has circulated around the Cal Poly community, showing club members playing basketball while atop the single-wheeled cycles.
Courtesy video from Danielle Sisso
Strassberg-Phillips said he was unaware of the video, as he is not involved in social media. However, he does not mind.
“I have always been comfortable in the limelight,” Strassberg-Phillips said. “I took a lot of years of theater.”
Strassberg-Phillips created the club last year, which meets every Monday at 6:30 p.m. on the Poly Canyon Village (PCV) basketball courts.
“We started with only like four or five of us, but slowly gained other people through our friend groups,” mechanical engineering sophomore and unicycle club treasurer Jakob Frabosilio said. “Then we started gaining people who weren’t affiliated with us and had seen us around and came.”
Frabosilio said that Strassberg-Phillips convinced him to start the club with him last year, although Frabosilio had never unicycled before.
“He convinced me to start it with him and he taught me how to do it,” Frabosilio said. “I’m still learning, but it’s a really fun experience.”
Aerospace engineering and physics sophomore Theresa Sandborn is another member who joined the club last year never having unicycled before. Now, she is cycling and shooting hoops simultaneously.
“Right now, we are playing just casual,” Sandborn said. “We are just learning the skills and getting used to it, but we’re hoping to be able to play other teams too.”
Sandborn said she encourages new members to join, or at least try it out because mastering the unicycle is not as hard as it may appear.
“Even if you think you can’t unicycle, it’s just cause you haven’t tried learning before,” Sandborn said.
Strassberg-Phillips said he hopes that by unicycling every day, he can inspire people to think differently about the world.
“I hope that in unicycling around, just like all these all other diverse things on campus, we can show that people can live in lots of different ways,” Strassberg-Phillips said. “Every nook and cranny has some little organization or something that’s doing something cool, and people should go out and try and find them.”