With spring now in bloom, the weather’s starting to get warmer. With the rise in temperature comes a rise in outdoor activity, and Rowan’s Parkour Club is embracing the change of season.

Parkour is a type of physical activity where those who partake, often called free-runners or a traceur, have to travel from point a to point b as efficiently and creatively as possible, using their surroundings as potential obstacles for them to overcome with special tricks.

Rowan Parkour Club meets outside of Bunce Hall on Tuesdays from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., Thursdays from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., and Fridays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. At the start of each meeting, the club holds a class where they work on certain challenges or practice specific skills that they then have to use in a line, which in parkour terms is a planned sequence of movements that free-runners perform.

“Every day that we meet, there’s an opportunity to practice individually and practice the moves that we’ve learned on your own or with other people, or trying to come up with a line. But on class days, session starts as a class where an experienced coach, either myself or Mitchell Wiegand, who has graduated but we pay him to come and coach,” said Christopher Soyring, a sophomore mechanical engineering major who’s also the current president of the Parkour Club.

Though it wasn’t always an “official” club, the Rowan Parkour Club has been around for years, acting as an unofficial club starting in 2008 and becoming affiliated with the Rowan Recreation Center in 2010.

“I got to Rowan in 2007 and at that point had been training by myself for about a year and a half or so. When I got there, there was obviously no club, but I was not aware of anybody else on campus who practiced parkour. It was still very new at the time. I spent my freshman year practicing by myself around campus here and there. It was also during my freshman year that I went to my first parkour jam in Atlantic City, and it was there that I realized that I really wanted to be a part of this community. So sophomore year, which would’ve been 2008 into 2009, I started putting flyers up around campus, homemade flyers that said I’d be meeting at this place at this time these days of the week, two or three times a week if you wanted to learn parkour, I’d teach you,” said Gabe Arnold, a Rowan class of 2011 alumni who founded the Parkour Club.

The Parkour Club welcomes all, from those who are longtime parkour free-runners to those who have hardly practiced. Students looking to get involved with the club don’t need any specific kind of experience or gear, as they’ll be taught the basics by those who teach the weekly classes. The club also tends to have nights where rather than practicing parkour, they’ll just hang out, watch a parkour film of some kind, or even just nix the physical activity altogether and have a game night, with One Night Ultimate Werewolf being a especially popular board game within the club.

For the current members of the Parkour Club, parkour is more than just a hobby. It serves as an opportunity for students to come together, test themselves physically and creatively, and ultimately have fun training with one another. Because at its core, parkour isn’t something that should be done individually, but rather as a group.

“Parkour is important to me because it is more than a sport, it’s a community. Everyone in the club knows each other, and we all spend time together outside the club. Like most of the club, I didn’t know a thing about parkour before joining the club at Rowan, but I’ve never regretted it, and I encourage anyone to join. Our club offers a community that expands beyond Rowan. Anyone who joins will also be exposed to all different types of culture, which is hard to find in sports clubs, plus the added bonus of learning some fun tricks,” said Gage Halpin, a sophomore computer science major who’s also the current treasurer of the Parkour Club.

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