Competitive jump-roping keeps athletes hopping
There's no child's play about this jump-roping. It is a high-speed, tightly choreographed athletic endeavor.
Julia Schwientek, Mary Bate, Colleen McCary and Cassy Evans, four members of the Hot Dog U.S.A. jump-rope senior team, were practicing their routines at Kamiakin Junior High School in Kirkland on Tuesday. Across the gym, the junior team jumped just as intensely.
Coach Amy Stavig hopes the hard work will pay off next week when the two teams compete in the world jump-roping championships in Australia.
The Kirkland-based rope skippers have been winning national and world competitions since 1980, when Bob Melson, a fifth-grade teacher, started the team. Stavig was a member of that original team.
"I was in fifth grade when it started," said the Sammamish woman. "Now I'm coaching and, like Bob, I'm a fifth-grade teacher at Helen Keller Elementary."
Competitive jump-roping, she said, combines the speed and endurance of track events with the agility, grace and demanding muscle power of gymnastics or freestyle ice skating.
As she talks, Schwientek, Bate, McCary and Evans do a complicated routine. Two of the 18-year-olds turn the ropes while two jump in, do splits, then do a splits tunnel where one jumps under the other in a splits position. A few more gyrations — without stumbling in the turning ropes — and the two who just performed the trick change places with the rope turners, who become the performing jumpers.
Although there are standards for the speed jumping, anything goes in the freestyle portions.
"We all make up the routines," Stavig said. "The kids do the creativity part and I make certain it maximizes the level of difficulty so they'll get points in competition. I troubleshoot what needs to be changed."
Typically, freestyle routines run 45 to 75 seconds.
"That doesn't sound like much until you try it," said Stavig.
The four, all college-bound this fall and all recent graduates of Juanita High School, have been jumping for years with the team. They've given up typical sports such as soccer and basketball for the intense, 2-½-hour workouts several times a week. In their spare time, they hold jumping workshops for elementary-age kids.
"People don't understand what we're doing unless they've seen us perform," said McCary, one of the top-ranked individual female jumpers in the country.
One junior member, Lauren Nielsen, 14, travels from Edmonds to practice.
"Jump-roping isn't like other sports," said junior team member Tanja Schwientek, 17. "You're needed at every practice because if a person is missing, the team can't do the routine."
One junior team member, 16-year-old Courtney McBroom of Kirkland, was a nationally ranked gymnast but left that sport to jump rope.
"Gymnastics wasn't fun anymore, but this is," she said.
When Stavig started jumping in the 1980s, there were few teams. Today Washington teams include ones in Leavenworth, Mill Creek, Bainbridge Island and Federal Way. The Hot Dog U.S.A. team, like the others, often makes guest appearances at professional and college sports events.
Later this summer, team members will head to Alaska for shows. The Hot Dogs have performed on tours in Europe, Asia, Australia, Central America and throughout the United States, and been featured in numerous television stories. They're also a demo team for the American Heart Association Jump Rope for Heart annual campaign.
Demonstrations and workshops at Boys and Girls Clubs and other places provide honorariums for the team's travel fund and an opportunity to recruit up-and-coming jumpers for the 50-plus-person team.
For information on the team, go to www.hotdogusa.org.
Sherry Grindeland: 206-515-5633 or sgrindeland@seattletimes.com