At Libertyville High School, there are around 70 clubs that students can choose to participate in. This year, four new pilot clubs have been created: Cubing Cats, Change My Mind, Powerlifting Club and German Social Club.

These clubs, however, are not official yet. All new clubs at LHS start as a “pilot club” for their first year, and may or may not get official approval for the following year from the Student Activities Director, Mrs. Jennifer Uliks.

To start a new club, students must have an LHS staff member sponsor the club and fill out the prerequisite paperwork, which can be picked up at Mrs. Uliks’s office, located next to the main office.

Cubing Cats

Cubing Cats, a club for students who enjoy solving Rubik’s cubes, meets every Thursday after school, and now has around 10 to 20 members per meeting.

Cubing Cats meets in room 214 and is always looking for new members, whether students have experience cubing or not.

Sophomore Richard Xiao explained the club has a very inclusive nature and it “doesn’t matter if you’re just playing with the Rubik’s cubes or just there to hang out.”

The club’s sponsor, Mr. Jonathan Kim, a social studies teacher at LHS, also enjoys Rubik’s cubing, but is not as enthusiastic about cubing as the club’s founder, sophomore Jack Regan.

During their meetings, Regan brings in many different cubes, all of which he has collected himself, ranging in different shapes, sizes and solvability. At past meetings, the group has raffled off Rubik’s cubes to be assigned for the week and they frequently have competitions to see who can solve a cube the fastest.

Change My Mind

The Change My Mind club was started by senior Jack Muraoka. They meet after school on Thursdays in Ms. Amy Holtsford’s classroom, room 242. At the meetings, they build arguments about controversial topics or things that the members are passionate about and discuss them with each other.

“[Change My Mind] club is a place where students can come in to just talk and bounce ideas off of each other, while still being respectful. And it’s not necessarily getting into political issues, but just having some fun exchanges of ideas,” stated the faculty sponsor, Ms. Holtsford.

A topic that they have discussed in the past is Muraoka’s belief that hot dogs should be considered sandwiches, and it is up to the rest of the club members to change his mind.

“My favorite thing about the club is the openness of it. I’m trying to make my club as open as possible,” said Muraoka.

Ms. Holtsford, having worked at Libertyville High School for more than 30 years, is retiring this year as a teacher but is continuing to coach girls basketball, and Muraoka and most of the students involved are graduating this year.

Ms. Holtsford stated that “if there are students who are underclassmen that want to continue the club, then I would totally encourage them to do so, and I don’t think it would be very difficult to find another teacher to sponsor it.”

German Social Club

German Social Club, started by sophomore Sofya Karpicheva, holds events related to German culture. They meet most Thursdays in Room 132 after school.

“I started it because I am very passionate about German and the language and the culture,” expressed Karpicheva.

So far, the new club has held three events: A cooking adventure, where they learned how to make typical German meals; a trip to Christkindlmarket in Chicago, a traditional German holiday market; and a gingerbread house decorating party to reduce stress the week before finals.  

“There’s a Spanish club, there’s a French club, but [there was] no German club!” said Karpicheva.

Mrs. Heidi Lechner, the club’s sponsor, stated that they “have not determined the rest of the semester’s events, but we have talked about an outing to a German restaurant and possibly a laser tag competition against the other language clubs.”

When German Social Club meets depends on when Karpicheva and Mrs. Lechner are free after school, and the meetings have been announced periodically in class to Mrs. Lechner’s German students.

Powerlifting Club

Senior David Serrecchia’s love for fitness and weightlifting led him to start the Powerlifting Club.

This club meets every Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the weight room after school for about an hour. They do all powerlifting, which includes the three types of lifts: squat, bench press and deadlift.

“I was working out down there all the time with those guys anyway, so I thought I might as well make it into a club,” explained Serrecchia.

The club’s sponsor, Mr. Dave Fowkes, also lifts with the students in the club. Mr. Fowkes, a locker room monitor at LHS, has experience lifting from his high school and college sports teams.

Mr. Fowkes emphasized that Powerlifting Club is open to both male and female students and, while they’ve had a majority of male membership this year, the club encourages girls to come and participate in their workouts.

“All of the people down there are just focusing on working out and they love working out as much as everyone else,” said Serrecchia.

The club eventually hopes to organize competitions and compete against other nearby schools’ powerlifting programs.