It turns out hurling is not just something college kids do on the Water Street sidewalks after pounding one too many Four Lokos.

A new calendar put out by female members of the Milwaukee Hurling Club is aimed at raising awareness of the sport; a quick moving, field hockey-like past time imported from Ireland.

Milwaukee's club is one of the biggest in the country with over 300 active members. As the club celebrates it's 15th anniversary, dozens of its female members decided to pose for a calendar aimed at heightening the sports profile in Milwaukee and raising money for traveling to out of state competitions.

Unlike other more risque calendars the hurlers opted to keep things PG with members reenacting iconic images like the cover of The Clash's "London Calling" album cover, Rosie the Riveter and Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

Karen Fink, the clubs administrative coordinator, talked with OnMilwaukee.com about how one gets into hurling and how it's served as an empowering force in her life.

Copies of the calendar can be ordered for $16 via Pay Pal through the club's Web site, where you can also go to find info about other payment options.

OnMilwaukee.com: Can you tell me a little bit about the history of the sport and how it's played?

Karen Fink: The sport itself predates Christianity in its origins. It is considered the fastest game on grass and it's the national sport of Ireland. The sport itself kind of looks like a hybrid of soccer, lacrosse and field hockey. Every player has about a 3-foot wooden stick that's kind of like a blunted hockey stick and you use it to hit the ball which is called a sliotar down the field -- either in the air or on the ground -- and into the goal for three points. If you hit it over the goal but through the uprights you get one point.

It's a very fast moving game. You have 15 players on each team and the field itself is the size of probably two football fields. It's about 100 meters wide by 150 meters long. So it's a very large field. A very quick moving game. The only things you can't do in a game are: you can't throw the ball but you can catch it, and you can't pick the ball up off the ground but you can use your hurley, or you can catch it on a bounce or something. And you can't run with it in your hands for more than four steps.

OMC: Where do you guys play when you require a field that big?

KF: There is very few places for us. We have been really fortunate to have a great relationship with the Milwaukee County Parks. We use Brown Deer Park. They have two big baseball diamonds there and we are able to have a regulation sized field. Before that we played at the lakefront which was phenomenal for our exposure but the field itself was right at the Brady Street bridge before that was redone. The field there was very uneven and very small but it suited our purposes and really helped with our growth.

OMC: Is there contact allowed?

KF: Shoulder to shoulder. So it's not like a full contact sport like rugby or football or something, but there is a lot of incidental contact. People sometimes get hit with the hurley.

OMC: How did the Milwaukee Hurling Club get started?

KF: The club was started 15 years ago by a person who had seen it over in Ireland and brought a few hurleys and sliotars back from his trip and it was kind of just, 'Hey this would be fun to play'. It started with just 20 people that first year and now we have over 300 players. We have a youth league. We have a coed adult league with 10 teams and then we also have camogie, which is the women's only version.

What makes the club unique from most other hurling clubs is that we play co-ed. Hurling much like our American football or hockey is not typically played co-ed. Men in Ireland play hurling and women play camogie. That's one thing that sets our club apart. The other thing is that we will train anybody. If you wanted to join next year we would get a hurley in your hand and teach you the basics of the sport. So what that has done is it allows anybody with any modicum of athletic ability to join and then we get everybody on a team. So if you really want to play you can do so.

OMC: How did you get into hurling? I'd imagine it's not the type of thing where your parents can sign you up for hurling little league as a kid.

KF: I had just moved to Milwaukee from Boston back in 1998 and I was just looking for friends and I made a few and they played hurling and said, 'You should join. At worst you'll make a couple hundred friends, but you actually might like it.' Lo and behold 11 years later I am still playing.'

OMC: What is it about the sport that you like so much?

KF: The thing with hurling that I think appeals to a lot of people is that the game itself is a very difficult game but that you can learn little skills every time you practice. So you might be really good at catching, so you can catch the ball but what do you do with it after that? So it's just always pushing you to be able to try new things.

I started when I was in my early 30s and I had never played a field sport before. It showed those first couple of years, but I've been really pushing myself and that is another thing that the club does. It lets you push yourself to achieve things that you never thought you would. Now we have men and women who have competed on the national level in their 40s who have national titles. There are times when you are chasing a 25-year-old and I am thinking "What the heck am I doing?" But it's still fun, and that's not to say that the 25-year-old is always going to beat me. At the end of the day the sport is fun. It's extremely addicting. It's hard to explain until you see it, and when you do you go, "I don't necessarily know what's going on but I want to play."

OMC: Where do you get your equipment from?

KF: In Ireland hurling is really a cottage industry, so you have all these guys around the country who make hurleys in their garage. So we've made friends with all these various hurley makes across the country and we've gotten very good at getting good quality hurleys to Milwaukee. We import them every year. I think last year we imported like seventy dozen. It's a lot of hurleys and we help other clubs get hurleys as well. So we do import those. We have to get the sliotars from Ireland, as well.

OMC: How do you guys match up size-wise with other clubs across the country?

KF: We are pretty big by anybody's standards. You are going to find hurling in the major Irish cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, New York. But then you have American clubs which are very similar to ours, just American-born players who have picked up the sport. You have that in Minneapolis, Denver, St. Louis, Indianapolis. There is an American team down in Chicago. Gosh, Florida, D.C. -- they are all over the place. It's really cool. So you are kind of part of this big secret that for some reason -- even though it is very popular in this country -- a lot of people haven't heard about it.

OMC: Tell me about the calendar and what you are hoping to accomplish with that.

KF: The Milwaukee Camogie Calendar is really just a group of the women who play both hurling and women's camogie and there is really very little difference between the sports. The Milwaukee Hurling Club at times does play other clubs and when we do that we can't play co-ed.

So we need a women's team and then we need men's team. So we really want more women to play and we want to spread the word about how you don't need to be 20-years-old to play and that's another thing that is important about our club. We have people who are starting to play in their forties and they do a good job. Playing hurling and playing in the Milwaukee Hurling Club you are never too old, and you can always set whatever bar you want to set for yourself.

With the Milwaukee Camogie Calendar we are trying to encourage women of all ages to come out and give it a try. Over the summer we had a lot of fun. We wanted to have a calendar but because we have a youth league we wanted to make sure it didn't portray the wrong image. There are a lot of calendars out there that are very adult and we didn't want that.

We wanted a calendar that showed how fun our people were and how creative. So we came up with the idea of recreating these iconic images, but somehow putting hurling in there. Our photographer is also a player and he has a kid in the youth league, Andy McKee. He really did a lot of brainstorming for ideas for the calendar. We did shooting over two-and-half-days and the result was the calendar. So everyone in the calendar is involved with the club.