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Super Skippers Jump to the Top of the World

BY MAUREEN TARQUINI, CARY YMCA SUPER SKIPPERS

Five members of the Cary YMCA Super Skippers jump rope team recently returned home from Toronto with a couple of special souvenirs — toboggans and gold medals.

It messed up their hair, but the five — Amy Tarquini, Lauren Warzecho, Melissa Robinson, Anna Perry and Amanda Kramer — were more than happy to put on the toboggans.  They stood on the podium to receive their overall gold medal for Junior (12-14) Female teams in the Maple Leaf International Rope Skipping competition. The Maple Leaf International and Worlds competitions were hosted by the International Rope Skipping Federation and ran from July 20 to 24 in Toronto. The event, which occurs every two years, brings together the top skippers from all around the globe — approximately 500 jumpers from 16 countries spanning six continents participated in this year’s event.

Rope skipping is a rapidly growing sport. There are currently 36 member countries in FISAC and the international committee is pursuing the inclusion of jump rope in the Olympics. The sport is expected to gain further momentum with the January 2007 release of a Disney Channel movie about a double-dutch team going to the Worlds (footage for the movie was taken at the competition).

Practicing winning ways

For anyone who has ever seen a jump rope competition, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that this is not a playground game — and it’s not for the faint of heart. In one of the Super Skippers’ especially demanding double-dutch tricks, two of the girls perform a simultaneous one-handed handstand while inside two turning ropes.

Such feats require extensive training and practice. The five girls have all been jumping with the team for four to five years. In the months leading up to the Worlds competition, the team practiced five to six days every week. While the Super Skippers are no strangers to national awards, having won medals in both the AAU JR Olympics and the U.S. Amateur Jump Rope National competitions, this was the first time any members had jumped in an international competition. The girls qualified to be members of Team USA with a first-place age-group finish in the U.S. Trials in Boulder, Colo., in March.

In addition to the top two overall teams, up to three teams in each age category (12-14,15-17 and 18-plus) and gender (all female, all male and mixed) were selected to represent the United States. The placements were made by determining who had the most points after eight separate events — four double-dutch and four single rope with a combination of speed and freestyle events. The girls were thrilled to be part of Team USA, but never dreamed that they would go on to win at Maple Leaf. In addition to the overall gold medal, the Super Skippers took a first or second place finish in six of the eight events.

Hot hopping

To say that these skippers are fast may be an understatement: In the single-rope speed relay, the girls averaged well over five rotations per second for the two-minute event. However, in spite of the fact that they did very well in the speed events, the team members had even greater success in the four freestyle events (single-rope pairs, single-rope four-person team show, double-dutch three-person and double-dutch four-person), where they dominated, winning a silver or gold in every category.

The routines, which are set to music and judged on both presentation/creativity and technical content. The routines have to be difficult enough to score highly in content, but must be near flawlessly executed, as one mistake lops off a full point out of the maximum 10 given for presentation.

The girls’ strongest challenge came from fellow Americans: two Bouncing Bulldogs teams from Durham. In the end, the U.S. teams swept all three overall medals in the junior female team competition, with the two Bulldogs teams taking the silver and bronze.

In addition to the Super Skippers and Bulldogs, several other local teams (Skipsations! from Chapel Hill and Impact Triforce from Cary) were also represented on Team USA. In fact, 36 out of the approximately 150 Team USA members were from the Triangle.

The Bouncing Bulldogs from Durham had 25 members on the team and took home five overall team medals. The Skipsations! from Chapel Hill had six members on the team and the senior females (Anna Schimmelfing, Wren Haaland, Suzanne Cash, Cindy Melton and Laura Engleman) took the overall gold in the Worlds 18-plus female division, finally beating the Hungarian girls who relegated them to the silver medal in the 2002 and 2004 Worlds. Tyler Perez from Cary’s Impact TriForce was a member of a senior (18-plus) all-male team that took home the overall silver medal in the Worlds competition.

In addition, Perez and Cash took the overall bronze medals in the individual (Masters) portion of the Maple Leaf event.

A highlight of the trip was the opportunity to meet actor Corbin Bleu of “High School Musical” fame when he came to watch the competition. He was in Toronto filming the movie for Disney Channel (working title — “Jump!”). Their former teammates Tyler Perez and Kiara Felder both landed parts in the movie. Perez was part of a rival double-dutch team and Felder was the “skipping double” for one of the lead actresses.

Many thanks

The girls would like to especially thank their coaches, Gary Anderson and Carie Steber. Anderson knows a thing or two about jump roping, since he is the repeat National freestyle champ in the males over-30 age division. His energy and enthusiasm for the sport are contagious. Steber has been skipping with the team for 10 years and coaching for the last two. Her kindness and boundless encouragement will be greatly missed when she leaves to attend Wingate University this fall.

The team also gratefully acknowledges the encouragement from the rest of their teammates, former coaches Tommy Hager and Shay Perez, the Cary Family YMCA and the team sponsors.

Rope-skippers hop to top of new sport.  

Playground pastime takes on a competitive edge

JOHN MURAWSKI, Staff Writer

APEX - When his high school peers in Cary were playing football and basketball, Tyler Perez was enduring the taunts and snickers that are unavoidable with the sport he chose: jump rope.

That's not a misprint. Jumping rope, usually thought of as a girly playground game, has evolved into a sport you can watch on ESPN: gravity-defying feats of agility that resemble gymnastics performed with a high-performance lasso.

Though only about a quarter-century old, competitive rope skipping has developed a distinct sports culture, with its own tournament circuit, celebrity athletes, private trainers and drug testing before international tournaments. And the Triangle has emerged as one of the world's hubs for rope-skipping talent, with four world-class clubs.

Perez, a 20-year-old jump rope athlete who has trained since age 13, competed Saturday at Apex High School in the Amateur Athletic Union Jump Rope District Championship. The N.C. State University junior was one of about 140 rope skippers ages 7 to 22 from North Carolina and Virginia, all vying for slots in the Junior Olympics finals this summer.

"If this sport were an Olympic sport," Perez said, "I would generously venture to say there are four to five people here today who would qualify to compete in the Olympics."

The term "jump" is a misnomer, for the sport involves every conceivable variation on the theme: flips, cartwheels, splits, handstands, rolls, twists, cancan dance moves and Cossack-style squat-stepping. At the advanced stage, the rope skippers release the rope at one end, never missing a beat while the rope circles the air and magically springs back into their clutch. All the while, the athletes are expected to smile calmly at the judges, one of the polite conventions of the sport.

As a teenager, Perez would silence doubters with the humble tool of his trade: a $2 jump rope whirring in a 180 mph blur. Today he is considered one of the top names in the sport. He made a cameo appearance in "Jump In!" -- this year's Disney Channel movie about the the jump rope craze and has traveled the world as a member of the USA Jump Rope All Star Team, the sport's equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters.

As the competition level intensifies, rope skipping is following a familiar pattern established in other sports. It's not unheard of for kids to get up at 5 a.m. to train. Parents hire private coaches to give their budding champions an edge. But the sport hasn't yet evolved to the adrenal stage where parents try to disqualify judges and threaten other kids, said Marley Braun, a Cary resident whose 11-year-old daughter competed Saturday.

Rope-skipping competitions grade athletes on speed, power and freestyle routines. The athletes perform solo and in double-dutch partnerships. They play for only about a minute, but that can be enough time to make 320 steps.

The routines are so complex and lightning-quick that the top score -- a 10 -- is more elusive than a hole-in-one in golf.

"I don't think I've ever seen one," said Anna Schimmelfing, 21, a competitor from Chapel Hill. "I would say it's near impossible."

Schimmelfing, a graduate of Elon University and a substitute elementary school teacher, is another of the world's rope skipping stars. Like Perez, she is also coaching the next generation of competitive rope skippers.

Although this is a young sport, there are leagues for adults and seniors. But already, the sport's range of possibilities has developed beyond any one jumper's physical ability.

"No one can do every trick there is," Schimmelfing said.