No experience is required or expected to be part of the club! Most new members have never jumped before so you’re not ‘too inexperienced’ to be in the club.
The easiest: join our email list (click subscribe on the left) and GroupMe.
Follow us on social media below to stay in the loop!
Meeting Presentations
Here’s a copy of the PowerPoint from an info session, it contains all this info.
Learning to skydive
To be able to jump with other club members and compete, you need to hold at least a USPA A license, which we can help you get! There are a few ways to make your first skydive, a tandem or AFF.
For a tandem, you are harnessed to an instructor who walks you through the entire jump, flies the parachute, deals with the landing, etc. You are more or less just along for the ride, so it’s a great way to try skydiving if you only want to do it once or don’t want to commit to as much training as AFF.
To get licensed, you’ll do Accelerated Free Fall (AFF). This is a worldwide standard training method consisting of normally 7-10 jumps with instructors who hold onto you in freefall and communicate via hand signals. You aren’t physically attached to your instructors, so after you pull your parachute, you fly by yourself to the ground. Fun, right? *note: doing a tandem first is not required. If you want to jump straight into AFF you can.
After that, you’ll jump by yourself or with an instructor to practice. At 25 jumps, you get your license and are undeniably a skydiver.
While a tandem does not count as AFF (if you’ve already done a tandem, you still have to do the whole AFF program), it does count towards the 25 jumps for your license.
Other fun things
We occasionally go to the wind tunnel, which is a great way for skydivers to practice and for new members to feel what freefall is like without jumping. We also go to different dropzones with different planes (hot air balloons? yes please!) and might even do advanced training together. It just depends on what people want to do so get involved so you can do fun stuff too!
Competing
As a competitive club, we compete! Any licensed skydiver is eligible. The biggest competition for us is the USPA collegiate competition held over Christmas break every year. Events include freefall formation building, accuracy landing, and more. It’s super fun and built for college students, so even new skydivers are competitive.