Jump roping seems like an elementary school playground game.
But for senior Grace Quakenbush, it’s way more than that.
It’s a dozen students from around the city jumping in sync, performing tricks with a rope that don’t look possible. It’s a rhythmic crack of ropes hitting the floor keeping the beat as music blares. It’s the Indy Air Bears, a competitive jump rope team here in central Indiana.
Quakenbush said she was fascinated early on by the world of jumproping and what it could become for her in the future.
“I saw at my old elementary school, Maple Grove, that they had a jump roping team, and my current team [the Air Bears] performed at their end of the year show,” Quakenbush said.
She said she found Indy Bears through the elementary school performance, and she joined the team in elementary school.
As a competitive jump roper, Quakenbush has had many opportunities when it comes to performing and winning awards, from solo awards to group titles.
“Within Indy, I’ve performed with the Indiana Pacers, and then IU and Purdue basketball,” Quakenbush said. “The highest award I’ve won was Gold at Nationals in Cincinnati for team freestyle.”
Quakenbush said her favorite part of being on the team was being able to learn from older people.
“There’s people in their mid twenties who always come back to practice,” Quakenbush said. “When I was younger, I took private lessons with one of the older team members, and we’ve been able to keep up our relationship.”
Those early lessons have paid off as Quakenbush has become more competitive with the upper level teams of the Indy Air Bears.
“There’s this one competition a year where we’re not split up between days, and we have to do every routine in one day. That one competition is from 8:00 in the morning to 9:00 at night,” Quakenbush said. “On competition days, I always listen to my routine songs before I get there and I run the routines through my head. We start off with endurance events, and then at the end of the day into the next day we will perform the routines that we made up and choreographed.”
Quakenbush said she experienced a period of time when it became difficult to keep up with her passion for jump roping.
“Everyone was changing their methods of jump rope and it includes a lot of gymnastics, which I started my sophomore year toward the end and it’s just really hard to pick up from a point where everyone else has been doing it their entire lives,” Quakenbush said. “But I ended up staying because I could still jump into the basic tricks and skills and make up routines. I still enjoy doing it, so that’s why I stayed.”
Quakenbush continues to pursue her career as a jump roper and will continue to be creative with her moves.
“I just found it very interesting because a lot of the tricks are very intricate and you can come up with a bunch of different combinations with just the basics. So as long as you have the foundation, you can continue to grow with it.”
