(Text of a recent article I prepared for PSR News)
By Jason Hayes
A little edgy … a little “crazy” … maybe even a little dangerous.
Parachuting; it’s all that and, even better, it’s a whole lot of fun.
Roget himself couldn’t come up with enough synonyms to fully describe the mix of fear and excitement that grips your gut as you wait your turn beside the plane’s door. With the wind ripping past your face and tearing at your clothing, your more sensible self screams out.
“What are you doing?!?”
But then the jumper in front of you disappears out the door. There’s no time for lingering doubts. You move to the door, and on the jumpmaster’s signal,
JUMP!
Momentary disorientation grabs hold and you’re gasping at the wind which soon rips you back into reality. You right yourself and see that you’re falling and
gaining speed; hurtling toward the ground at over 100 miles per hour.
When the chute opens and pulls you back hard, everything changes. Spine-tingling and adrenaline-pumping suddenly becomes quiet and relaxed, and you enjoy a leisurely float down to earth, while drinking in the view of the open ground below. It’s only in the last few seconds that you realize the ground is still coming at you quickly. So you pull hard on the steering toggles and, hopefully, set down easy.
Over the past few weeks about 100 of the nation’s top collegiate parachutists have literally descended on SkyDive Arizona’s drop zone, in Eloy – on Highway 10, about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson – to experience that same rush over and over again.
But this is no run-of-the-mill group of weekend warriors, out to try some new experience. These dedicated parachutists have made several hundred, or even several thousand jumps each. As United States Parachute Association (USPA) spokesperson Nancy Koreen noted, they’ve moved well beyond the initial fear and excitement associated with jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. The jumpers at the Collegiate Nationals, like many other top-rank athletes, have found in their sport a means of testing themselves and of pushing past limits they or others might have set.
From December 29th to January 1st teams from colleges and universities across the country are gathering at SkyDive Arizona’s drop zone to compete in the USPA’s 2010 National Collegiate Parachuting Championships. Two-, four-, and six-person teams go head to head in formation skydiving, vertical formation skydiving, and landing accuracy events to see which school can take home bragging rights in what the USPA calls “one of the most thrilling sports known to man.”
Athletes at this competition are operating at a level the casual jumper can only imagine. They perform in-air acrobatics where a wrong twist of the body, or move of the arm or leg could send them and their partners careening out of control, into each other, and out of the running for a medal.
Koreen points out that the formation events are classic skydiving; what most people have seen on TV and the Internet. Jumpers in free fall – belly to the earth – group together, holding on to each other’s hands and feet to create a series of formations. Each of the teams have a set amount of time to maneuver themselves into selected shapes and patterns. Teams that create these intricate forms in the designated time and with the fewest errors take home the medals.
Vertical formation events involve teams bending and spinning themselves into their yoga-like poses as well. However, they add in the difficulty of completing the formations in upright (standing or sitting) and upside down positions.
Accuracy landing competitions, just as the name suggests, involve jumpers exiting the plane and flying their chutes to specific locations on the drop zone.
Koreen notes that while the nationals mean stiff competition for the parachutists, the gathering is more about the camaraderie of people in the sport. In fact, as we watched, members of one team demonstrated that group spirit when they took time out of their practice to show members of a competing team how to perform a maneuver. But if you put it to the competitors directly, they’ll still admit that there is school and personal pride on the
line. When asked what they look forward to most in the competition, one of the U.S. Military Academy’s Black Knights chuckled and said, “the podium.”
Boasting nearly 33,000 members, over 250 affiliated skydiving schools and clubs, and an almost 65 year history, the USPA is a voluntary association of organizations and individuals dedicated to the support and promotion of safe skydiving through training, licensing, and instructor qualification. USPA also works to ensure skydiving maintains a place in the nation’s airspace and airports, and to promote competition and record-setting programs.
First time jumpers and dedicated parachutists can learn more about skydiving and parachuting at www.uspa.org. Information on the Collegiate National Championships and SkyDive Arizona’s Holiday Boogie festival is available at www.skydiveaz.com.
— Robert Cunningham contributed to this article.
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(Accompanying high-resolution photography of Collegiate Nationals practice and competition can be viewed on the PSR News flickr photostream – http://www.flickr.com/photos/psrnews).
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