Jumping out of an airplane doesn’t appeal to everyone. To some though, it is a lifestyle.
And those people are getting together. This Wednesday, a meeting for the new CSU Skydiving club will take place in Lory Student Center room 211E at 4 p.m.
Chris Lierheimer, a junior construction management major who is the driving force behind the club, has himself gone on over 450 jumps in the past three years.
“The goal is to get people to see how exciting and fun skydiving can be,” Lierheimer said in an email. “We also plan on dispelling some myths about how dangerous it is and how expensive it is.”
CSU Skydiving will jump primarily at Mile Hi Skydiving in Longmont, where a jump can cost about $200 for a tandem jump — a type of skydiving where a student is connected to the teacher via harness.
Lierheimer said that the club was created to mainly raise awareness about the sport and organize people who are interested in it.
“Member dues will be cheap and will probably just cover the cost of the t-shirt,” Lierheimer said. “That alone would be pretty cool. Wear that t-shirt around you’re almost guaranteed to pick up chicks, or dudes. Whatever you’re into –– I don’t judge our female members.”
Each club at CSU must have a faculty member to represent it, and for the Skydiving Club that someone is Travis Annameier, a Center for Advising and Student Achievement coordinator and avid skydiver.
“The first time I went it just seemed like a good idea at the time,” Annameier said, who has jumped over 6,000 times in the past 10 years. “This last year I did mostly tandems, which is nice because if it’s your first jump you can enjoy it a little more.”
CU–Boulder also has a skydiving team and each year schools from around the country compete in the United States Parachute Association Collegiate Nationals. This year, they’re from Dec. 28 to Jan. 2 near Eloy, Ariz.
“I’m hoping that once we get enough people to go, we could take a group of kids down there,” Lierheimer said, who took home a silver medal in the accuracy competition last year. “There are many different disciplines within skydiving which is why I think it will appeal to many different people.”
Some of the competitions include things like formation jumping (a group of people creating as many different formations as they can), the aforementioned accuracy jumps, freestyle skydiving (a combination of gymnastics and diving), as well as others.
“I certainly think that there will be an interest,” Annameier said. “Even among people who had no prior knowledge or interest.”
