Jump Rope Tricktionary: Democratizing Jump Rope Knowledge Around the World

Access the website at The-Tricktionary.com.

And the Android app on the Play Store at The Jump Rope Tricktionary

Sports that require creativity along with athleticism such as jump rope are feedback loops. The masters from the current generation have learned nearly all there is to learn, so they create. Each jumper is able to add his or her own drop to the ocean of jump rope knowledge. Now they are able to teach the next generation of jumpers more than the generation before them. Finally, that generation becomes the new masters and have their own chance to contribute to the sport. This cycle continues year after year, generation after generation, innovation after innovation, and eventually one has to ask themselves: is there an end? Is there a point where every single possible jump rope skill has been created? I am a believer that the answer is no, at least until there is too much knowledge to accumulate in a single career. If we have been able to push the sport to its current level with such a small, niche community of jumpers, imagine what would be possible if the whole world were involved.

When I first started jumping back in 2004, the most phenomenal experiences I had were at workshops and camps. These events were some of the only places in the world where one could learn from the masters of the time. But that’s the exact issue: accessibility. Knowledge about our sport was exclusive to the currently active members of teams that attended these events. Jump rope, however, should be an accessible sport to anyone.

I toyed around with many ideas before finally landing on the simple idea of a video dictionary. People around the world who could not attend workshops and did not know of any teams had no idea where to start. Through this video dictionary, I hoped to guide them along the same path that myself and many other jumpers originally started on. After about a year of work, the Jump Rope Tricktionary was released in March of 2016. Since then I have added over 156 jump rope skills, reached over 100,000 users from over 60 different countries, and continued to improve it along the way. The app has been translated into three languages. The Tricktionary was my first large-scale coding project and I could not be happier with how it turned out. It is a small example of what is possible when we use technology to make our sport more accessible and teach as many people as possible.

None of this would have been possible without my friend Svante Bengtson who was an invaluable mentor along the way and got the web app up and running from my initial attempt at a backend.