Formation Skydiving
By Alex Jordaan

The Formation Skydiving committee this year consists of Alex Jordaan, Rodd Hill, Jacqui Bruwer, Liz Cooper and Norman Langeveldt. Collectively we share the same goals in terms of formation skydiving development yet all have our individual thoughts about how to achieve them based on past experience and efforts. This collaboration should lead to a successful term for the committee and the FS members.

Goals

So while we are on the subject of goals let’s discuss that briefly. Our main priority is to increase the awareness and participation in formation skydiving and by extension to improve the skills in our country. Naturally our responsibilities include some aspects of the administration and government of the FS discipline with regard to rules, judges, national competition, teams, representation and other areas. Fundamentally however we want to improve formation skydiving in South Africa. We will work towards this goal by facilitating environments and events that are conducive to inspiring new FS jumpers to participate and motivating existing FS jumpers to continue. Talent development should take care of itself once jumpers are motivated and excited to pursue formation skydiving.

Past Events

Historically the FS committee has used the funds that were generated by SSA memberships to host skills camps around the country. These skills camps are somewhat successful and succeed in their intentions for the small group of jumpers that attend them. These jumpers are usually the ones already motivated to pursue the discipline so while the skills camps have a small positive affect on those participants, they don’t do as much as we would like to bring new jumpers into the sport. New jumpers that do attend them soon become neglected by the committee since we only have enough funds to do a few camps a year and each jumper maybe gets a couple of coached jumps in. There is certainly merit in this approach but in the grand scheme of things as we see it this isn’t as effective as the committee would like.

Moving Ahead

The committee this year would like to try a different approach, part of which is making formation skydiving information and resources available to our membership. In addition to just pushing information to you we would also like to set up a process that will enable all jumpers to communicate directly with the committee and it’s members in an easy yet managed manner. This communication could be anything from comments to questions to requests for a video debrief from one of the coaches. A happy place will be created that will bring all of us together in a way that facilitates learning, development and ultimately will lead to a significant improvement in our discipline. In addition to getting information to you, we plan on combining all the smaller skills camps that we usually do into a single camp that will hopefully bring all the jumpers around the country together for a weekend of extreme fun and learning. The format will not be like any of the skills camps you are likely to have attended in the past and will attempt to bring together all jumpers from all disciplines and from all skill and experience levels into a single event which will be come an annual gathering, possibly extending into a longer, larger event encompassing more disciplines. We are thinking results and the best way to get these results is to get all the skills, talent, experience, enthusiasm, energy and passion into a single place at the same time and let everyone feed off and learn from that. This will be an environment that will benefit the AFF graduate who desperately wants to be a part of something as well the seasoned competitor looking for better ways to do things. We al have something to teach somebody and something that we can learn from somebody and The Camp of Champions is going to be the place where that happens!

VRW

Something that the FS committee is also looking into is the relatively new discipline of Vertical Relative Work (VRW). While you may think that this falls under the Artistic Events committee we have a feeling that there may be some crossover and the VRW event may ultimately be more of a FS event than an Artistic Event. Whichever way the management goes, VRW as a new discipline will benefit from the experience that the FS jumpers and the committee can bring so at least initially we will be investing some energy into this new discipline. Right now we are learning about it, learning how to do it, learning how to teach it and soon will be communication with the membership in order to pass on our learning to you and hopefully learn something from you. Quid pro quo as they say.

Conclusion

This email is just a brief overview of what we are planning. We are currently setting up an extensive website where you will be able to learn a lot more about what’s going so be on the lookout for communication regarding that in a week or so. The bottom line is that the FS committee wants to give you as a member value in terms of ensuring that all your needs in terms of sports skydiving are not only met, but your opinions and goals are constantly challenged and addressed. Everyone derives something different from the sport, so in whatever way you get your satisfaction, if we can contribute to increasing that and making the sport better for you and those around you and in the process increasing the quality of the sport in SA, then we will feel like we have done our job.

See you all soon.

Alex Jordaan – alex@xlife.co.za
Rodd Hill – rodd.hill@eoh.co.za
Jacqui Bruwer – jacqui@projectlink.co.za
Liz Cooper – skydivesa@yahoo.com 
Norman Langeveldt – primom@mweb.co.za

The FS Committee would like to congratulate our National Formation Skydiving Team, Project Sky-high with their achievement at the World meet. The 4-way placed 14th with an average of 15.7, and the 8-way placed 7th with an average of 12.8. Truly a remarkable achievement!

SA National Judges, Claire King and Chanel Robinson, attended the FS judges training and both passed the tests with flying colours. In fact, they were the only two to have passed the VFS tests and Chanel scored the highest mark of all the trainees in the practical evaluation.

Well done to all of you!!!!