Backyard Club was approved at the October meeting of Battle’s Executive Council. The new club, influenced by Rock Bridge’s Pickleball Club, wanted to create an environment in which students could get together and hang out while enjoying well-known backyard games.
Backyard Club schedules a multitude of different games. Whether it’s spikeball or cornhole, wiffle ball or pickleball, Backyard Club plays them all. “It’s basically any game that you could think of that you do outside,” said senior Finley Polacek. “It’s anything that you would do at a barbeque.”
Although it might have started small, the club has rapidly grown according to Polacek, with thirty-eight members showing up for club photos and roughly twenty students on average participating in meetings. “Everybody’s welcome […] it’s a very new club and we’ve only had one meeting but we’re trying to plan a lot more meetings second semester,” said senior Grant Hughes.
The club’s creation was relatively spontaneous, created by four friends at lunch. Its founders, seniors Grant Hughes, Finley Polacek, Henley Tarwater, and junior Francis Wilson, all run Backyard Club. Backyard Club has four leadership roles with Polacek as President, Hughes as Vice-President, Tarwater as secretary, and Wilson as PR Officer. They help set up meetings, get people to meetings, help bring equipment, bring snacks, and stay in contact with the club’s sponsor and advisor Mr. Evan Schilling.
Backyard Club’s current structure is very loose with meetings changing and adapting based on the weather or other factors. The locations of meetings vary, sometimes taking place on the softball field, the commons, or maybe even the tennis courts depending on the conditions. Even the dates of meetings are flexible and fluctuate, taking place on Mondays. The Backyard Club posts updates on their Instagram, @thebackyardclubbhs, and is open to all students.
