For Josh Siegel, there was no question what his favorite sport was. Since early grade school, he’d been in love with jump rope, performing with a travelling team that wowed crowds across Northeast Iowa.
But the dawn of Siegel’s Stanford career four years ago didn’t seem like the best time to admit to such a niche taste—at least not during the pre-Orientation icebreaker where newcomers were prompted to find others with likeminded sport interests. He wanted to meet people, not hold a lonely torch for an unlikely passion.
And so Siegel, ’14, was about to trump up his feelings for tennis when he did a double take. Across the crowd, a student was calling out “Jump rope!” Agatha Bacelar, a Junior Olympian jumper from Miami, had come to the Farm intent on bringing the sport with her, popular or not.
“We just kind of looked at each other, like ‘Yeah!’” she says.
The encounter didn’t lead to immediate collaboration. Bacelar had suffered an injury flipping at nationals, and both were busy with new lives. But the seed was sown for what has flowered into a collegiate rarity—a Stanford jump rope team. Members say they know of only one other like theirs, at Ohio State.
The process was slow. Sophomore year, Bacelar, ’14, and Siegel made a video to audition for a campus talent show. The performance fell through, but the recording caught the eye of incoming frosh Justin Meier, a national champion from Idaho who’d performed everywhere from the Late Show with David Letterman to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
“This just makes me more excited to go [to Stanford],” he wrote in the YouTube comments. Bacelar replied: “We want to start a club or team of sorts at Stanford. You interested?”
Bacelar, Siegal, and Meier in a 2013 performance of the Propellers (Photo: L.A. Cicero / Stanford News Service)It takes three to play double Dutch. And with Meier, ’16, the trio began limited performances on campus as The Propellers. But things really gained momentum last year with the arrival of Stewart Isaacs, who knew Meier from the jump rope circuit.
Like the others, Isaacs, ’17, took up the sport early in grade school. Growing up in Cincinnati, he says, there was never any question his sport deserved the same respect as more traditional activities. You only had to glimpse him flipping and flying like a gymnast between the swirling ropes to see he wasn’t goofing around.
Jump rope had taken Isaacs to competitions as far away as South Africa, put him in a Disney movie and given him an endless outlet for creativity. “A jump rope god,” pronounced one enthusiastic YouTube viewer.
Isaacs arrived at Stanford ready to work to get university recognition for the club. Soon Stanford Jump Rope was official.
The club’s debut last February at Dance Marathon met with raucous applause for the flips, handsprings, leapfrogs and probably general surprise at what jumping rope could mean. “I knew people would go crazy,” Siegel says. “I don’t think I was wrong.”
Other campus performances followed, none more important for the club’s growth than one in front of hundreds during Admit Weekend last spring. The exposure brought a surge of new members this year, including freshman Mason Rogers, another lifelong competitive jumper. But for the first time, the club also had 10 or so newbies looking to learn at the club’s twice-weekly practices.
So far, performances such as one at San Francisco’s Exploratorium in October have kept the focus on the experienced members. But by the end of winter quarter they hope to perform with all members contributing, says Isaacs, who is club president. And perhaps in the future, Stanford Jump Rope will compete.
With the core in place—Siegel remains on campus as a grad student, and Bacelar, who graduated in December, is in the area—they’re confident they’ve got the makings for a long-term addition to the Stanford scene.
“I am really glad Agatha had the gumption to be by herself and say that she was a jump roper,” Siegel says.
Sam Scott is a senior editor at Stanford.
