A baseball, football, tennis ball and many others when thrown, kicked, or hit, will go forward and stop there. However, when you throw a boomerang, it has the potential to come right back to where you threw it.

“I had no idea that it was so simple to do, you throw it and it comes right back to you,” said Travis Hankins, a business philosophy major.

On Tuesday, Moorpark College hosted Multicultural Day. Originally sought out to provide culture to a homogeneous student life, now it is a day for alternative instruction and celebration of many different cultures.

On the soccer fields, Dr. Jerry Caplan, philosophy and religion instructor at Moorpark, taught the attendees about the origin of the boomerang, as well as the uses and, of course, how to throw one for leisure.

“You can kill game with boomerangs,” said Caplan, a former U.S. national team competitor. “I however, do not participate in this kind of practice. I use it for pleasure.”

The boomerang has been around for at least 30,000 years and has a rich ancient history. King Tut, the famous pharaoh of Egypt, owned a collection of boomerangs, some for hunting and others for pleasure.

The most famous place for boomerangs is Australia, where some date back to over 10,000 years ago. Caplan was a part of the first U.S boomerang team and traveled to Australia to challenge the Aussies at seven different locations: they won six of them.

On Multicultural Day, Caplan showed the crowd how to throw a boomerang properly and then turned it over to the students to experiment with plastic ones of their own. He brought each student up and, one by one, gave them instruction on where to aim.

“You want to pick up grass, to tell where the wind is blowing, then throw about 45 degrees to the right,” said the philosophy teacher.

The event lasted from noon to 1 p.m. About 40 students were given the opportunity to prove their worth on the soccer pitch by throwing the boomerangs. Some students hopped back in line for another round of throwing the methodical weapons. For a talented few, the boomerang came right back to them on their first throw. The only thing left to do was catch it to complete the entire act of ‘boomeranging.’

The next boomerang world cup is in Cologne, Germany in 2016. Maybe we will see Moorpark College alumni headlining the event, or one of the forefathers for the U.S., Dr. Jerry Caplan.