Sports Activities

Bart Stuck has been active in a variety of sports over his life time; this is an integral part of daily life, where the sports activity is actually a form of meditation, combining a variety of mental and physical attributes, leading to a union of mind and of nature.

Growing up, he played Little League Baseball and Babe Ruth Baseball. He learned to play tennis, basketball, touch football, volleyball, golf, bicycling and jogging/running. In college, he participated in Intramural Sports: touch football, volleyball, basketball, softball, badminton and golf; he also participated in Varsity Tennis and Varsity Squash.

While he was working at Bell Laboratories in Northern New Jersey he played tennis on an industrial league team, and squash in a Northern New Jersey winter squash league, as well as playing recreational basketball, tennis and running in many 10K road races and half marathons. In the 1900 time frame in New York City, there were literally thousands of squash courts and people of all kinds played the game; over time, the number of courts dramatically shrank, until in the 1960s squash was played at a very small number of private clubs with affluent members.  In the 1970s public squash court facilities began to appear, along with racquetball facilities. Bart worked with a very capable group of individuals to create the Northern New Jersey Squash Racquets Association in 1977, a nonprofit that was dedicated to promoting the game of squash for novices of all ages, especially children and women; when it was founded in 1977, it had a hierarchy of four leagues, an A/B league at the top for the best players, a C league and a D league (since then, squash has chosen to use a point system to denote player skill, with the higher the point the more skilled the player); there were roughly 200 members, the majority in the C and D league; today there are over 500 members! At the same time, a junior team squash tournament was set up between Boston, New York, Northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, which continues. There are over one hundred high schools and prep schools that participate in junior tournaments and naional competitions. The Sy Perkins Silver Squash Tournament, a major junior squash tournament was created that had 100+ entries at the outset, and continues to be held every February. Today there are literally thousands of junior high and high school students played squash at the national level and in a high school team and individual championship, due in large part to the access to public courts everywhere. A byproduct of this activity is that the sport of squash racquets is no longer dominated by a small number of affluent individuals, but instead is highly democratic and open to all ages and genders. The British seeded the sport of squash throughout the Empire, so today there are international squash players from England, Ireland, Egypt, South Africa, India, Australia, and Canada; for the first time ever, squash will be in the 2028 US Olympic Games. Bart held national rankings in squash in the Mens 35+, Mens 40+ and Mens 45+, and participated in a number of United States Racquets Association annual national championships. He played on the New York City Lockett Cup Squash Team competition in the 1970s with matches against teams from Boston and Philadelphia. He continues to play a limited amount of recreational tennis and squash, and walks at the beach on Long Island Sound almost daily.

Bart enjoyed hiking and camping in different US national parks. He has been active in the Appalachian Mountain Club and spent nights at many of the huts on the ridge of the Presidential mountains (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe) in New Hampshire, as well as climbing Mount Kitahdin in Maine which is one terminus of the Appalachian Trail. In 1997 he went to Nepal and trekked up to Kala Patar, 18,100 feet above sea level, overlooking the first base camp for Mount Everest climbers.

In the late 1970s Bart went cross country skiing in the winter locally in Northern New Jersey and then in 1977 at Yellowstone at Old Faithful Geyser Winter Lodge for a week, plus several trips to Mount Tremblant in Quebec over Presidents Day weekend, as well as local cross country skiing in Jockey Hollow National Historical Park. This led to downhill skiing with a group from Bell Labs initially at Steamboat in Colorado, but then to many other areas in Colorado, in New Mexico, at Banff in Alberta Canada at Whistler Blackcomb in British Columbia Canada, in California, in Washington, in Vermont, in New Hampshire, in Maine at Sunday River, and in Austria at Lech-Zurs.

In 1994 he became certified as a beginner and then advanced scuba diver in the PADI organization, and did over 100 scuba dives in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Australia, and the Red Sea.

From 1994 to 2007 he participated in four different holiday week long bike rides in France: Chablis, Provence, Dordogne and Burgundy. You would bicycle roughly thirty to fifty miles a day, your bags would be moved from hotel to hotel, you would be trailed by a sag wagon that could repair any bike problems on the spot, and you never get a bad meal in France!

In 2000 he joined the Saugatuck Rowing Club to learn how to row in an eight person shell with a coxswain. He worked on Concept2 erg rowing machines to achieve a time of two minutes for rowing five hundred meters, and participated in a charity race on the Norwalk River with a rowing team from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Westport.

Bart walks on the Connecticut beaches on Long Island Sound virtually every day, for roughly three to five miles.  This is because due to all his sports activities, he has osteo arthritis in his left ankle that results in significant swelling if he runs on a hard surface like a road or squash court.  One day he was walking on Soundview Avenue in Westport CT by Compo Beach when he saw 40-50 seagulls circling up ahead of his walk.  When he reached the focus on the circling sea gulls, he found that a sea gull had landed on top of a trash can that was seated into a wooden frame that had wooden slats; the sea gull had landed on the top of the trash can, which was painted black and was quite slick, and the sea gull slid to the side of the top of the trash can and its two legs slipped between two different wooden slats in the wooden frame, and the sea gull was hanging upside down outside the wooden frame.  Bart walked over to the sea gull, grabbed its two legs that were hanging down, lifted the sea gull up above the wooden frame, and then let it stand on the beach sand.  The sea gull then flew off; in the mean time, the number of circling seagulls had grown to perhaps a hundred, and they all flew off!  Bart had no idea sea gulls were communal in any way: this incident showed otherwise!