My Evolution in skydive
I grew up in a skydiving family in the early 80’s. My pops was a big time belly flier and that was THEE discipline at the time. Belly flying had grown from the style and accuracy and CRW days, and my dad was at the top of his game.
I remember watching my dad teach newbies techniques on perfecting the arch, inspiring people in getting on a formation skydiving world record, and seeing his eyes light up when he could dive last out for a 10-way competition. Although it was belly, belly, belly, another discipline that was new is what really caught my eye: freestyle.
Freestyling is such an elegant expression in the sky – gymnastics without a floor board – and beautiful. I remember watching the likes of Deanna Kent, Dale Stewart and Stephania Martenego. I knew then, that’s how I wanted to fly!
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FINDING FREESTYLE
When I discovered freestyle, it’s all I wanted to do. And I did. I did a lot of solos with no coaches, just watching the hard-to-find videos or try to emulate the rare freestyle pictures in publications. It was hard – it was hard to perform, hard to find someone to film me that had skills to film my flailing self, and hard to find camaraderie with others since I was – literally – on a solo mission. But I pushed on.
COMPETITION SKYDIVING
I attended my first national in 1999 but I was the only participant in Women’s Freestyle and wondered why the discipline was so underrepresented. The disciplines were separated by Women’s Intermediate and Open, and Men’s Intermediate and Open Classes and left very few competitors, if any, in each class. I continued to compete and won the next two years USPA Nationals in Open Women’s Freestyle. That led me to represent the USA at the World Cup in Vienna, Austria placing 4th.
In 2002 things started to change as I was starting to wake up to the freedom of freeflying – a similar discipline to freestyle but with teammates. So I started focusing on freeflying and started the all women’s open freefly team, Sugar Gliderz with Amy Chmelecki and Jen Key. Training in two different disciplines was difficult. I placed 3rd in Freestyle and decided that to be my last year to compete in freestyle. That year we also made the debut as the only female freefly team placing 6th.
We may not have placed high, but we made such a huge impression on the freeflying community giving rise to more females pursuing the discipline, or staying in the sport longer. It was definitely hard work to create routines for two different disciplines, but it was so much fun and rewarding.
But the year 2003 had other plans for me. That summer my father, the legendary pioneering skydiver and DZO, Roger Nelson had passed away. My life felt like it was shattered to bits but I kept doing what I knew as I forged my way in this unexpected path – compete.
SUGAR GLIDERZ EVOLUTION
My Sugar Glider teammate Jen Key retired from the team and in 2004 we added camera flyer, Steve Curtis. That following year Amy pursued a different avenue in the sport and even though I took on the daunting task of running an inherited DZ, I still wanted to compete and created Sugar Gliderz 2.0 with Brooke Schultz and Kate Hoffstetter and we competed in 2004 and 2005.
