Not this weekend, but the one before, Skydive Chicago once again hosted the illustrious Cloud Games, one of my favorite events of the year. If you’re not in the know, it’s a dispersed competition run by Skydive Chicago, where skydivers can compete from the comfort of their home DZ. You upload videos as you do the jumps and, Tada! A competition.
You should check out their website! They have more details, fun pics, and results here.
First, the thank yous
First, to Skydive California, for working with us to manifest the teams and get our jumps in. Cloud Games doesn’t benefit Skydive CA at all, so I am eternally grateful that everyone makes it possible for us to jump our faces off for Cloud Games.
Second, to Skydive Chicago, for hosting the event! It is such a fun event, and it gives jumpers the opportunity to try out competition on a budget, without committing to the travel or cost of going to Nationals. We appreciate you working around the 2 hour time difference and all the hoops you have to jump through to let Skydive CA compete.
Next, to Richo Butts, for being the meet director at Skydive CA! He makes a big hoopla every year, encouraging teams to get into cloud games, then he prints out the draws, the slates, attends the meet directors meetings, etc.
Finally, to all the teams. To the teams that I was on, thank you for taking time out of your weekend to fly with me! And to be flexible as we were juggling teams and events. Thanks especially for the people who were always on time. You make my life easier. And thanks to the teams that I wasn’t a part of. I’m so proud of you for coming out!
Props to the Competitors
Props to all the competitors that came out. While I find structured skydiving, like competition and training camps and try-outs, incredibly rewarding, that is not the norm. It takes so much extra effort to do a competition than just showing up for a day of fun jumping. You need to finish the jumps, so you have to keep skydiving even if you’re tired or hungry. You have to follow the dive flows, even if they’re incredibly hard and you hate them. You have to remember whose hand to hold and who to shit-whip (which blocks and randoms are in that dive flow). You probably have to show up early to walk the skydives which takes time and engineering and a fair amount of confusion. For any camera flyers, you have the added pressure of making sure you have plenty of Go Pro battery, that you get the teams in frame, and that you don’t accidentally drop a SD card out of the door of the airplane. Even a chill competition like Cloud Games still demands more than a day of just hanging out at the DZ. So I’m glad the competitors were all willing to get out there and do it anyway.
Also, big props especially to the pick-up teams. I find pick-up teams to be much harder than trained teams. If you’re training, obviously, you’ve flown the points before, so they’re easier. But you also probably have the blocks and randoms memorized by letter and number. Having the formations memorized takes a bite out of the mental load for me; it’s less brain strain to remember what comes next when I have a visual reference for what the formation should look like in my brain. Also, having a shared language relieves some brain strain. Being able to say, “Let’s exit a G” and having everyone approximately understand which grips that entails (even if you haven’t determined who is flying which spot yet), is a short cut. Needing to individually describe all the grips for each formation takes time and is more difficult to remember. Finally, a pick-up team often has little or no convention for who flies where on each point. Once again, having that convention just reduces the mental load on everyone. So, yeah, pick-up teams are hard.
So, Who Competed? How’d it Go?
Skydive CA had teams in Rookie FS, MFS Intermediate, Advanced and Open (3), Open VFS, and 10way.
The Rookie FS team, Peanut Butter and Jelly, did 5 jumps that Saturday. Before the meet, they hadn’t ever all jumped together before, but they took home a silver anyway! I love that SDC opened up the Rookie FS class; it provides accessible skydives for people who really are interested but really intimidated by competition. Plus, with only 5 skydives in the draw, it doesn’t eliminate anyone because they can’t finish the jumps.
The most popular event at Skydive CA, MFS, brought out 3 teams, one in each class. The intermediate team, Fly Faster Steve, had been training a little bit over the last month or so to prepare. Neither had competed before or flown any official MFS, yet they took home a Silver medal anyway! The advanced team, Exit Disorder, flew really well and took home a bronze. Finally, my team, FMS: French Marc Situation, flew in open (partially because we won Advanced last year, partially because open is more fun). Great news: we took a bronze by proxy!
The VFS team from Skydive CA, Chip the Chump: More Like SDC Bore, Amirite? #gotem, also took home a bronze by proxy, happily. Three of us won gold in Advanced VFS last year (again, by proxy, as we were the only team), so we got bumped up. It was fun! Certainly, way more challenging but fun!
Finally, 10way. We only completed 2 jumps for 10way. Even then, we never got a complete build. But I was so stoked to do them; we talked a number of Skydive CA staff into jumping which was a treat. I rarely get to do a fun jump with all of my staff friends.
Richo and I fit in 10 VFS jumps, 8 MFS jumps, 2 10way jumps, and a fun jump across Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I’d call it a success.
I really love that SDC wraps up Cloud Games with a broadcast style award show. It’s really fun to see who competed, and how it all shook out. Here’s a link to this year’s awards, if you’re interested.
Thoughts
Throughout the weekend, a lot of people asked what was going on. This was after both Richo and I felt like we’d harped on the subject heavily to people. We both posted several times on the fun jumpers page. We both mentioned it a lot to people at the DZ. I offered to do some match-making for belly teams even. I am just surprised that people still were caught unawares. I really want to get more people into competition and Cloud Games is a great venue for that. However, I clearly can’t even get the message out effectively to people at our DZ. We’ve decided to make some posters next year, which should hopefully help. I’m just left without many more ideas of how to spoon feed this better to people.
Also, all through the weekend I heard a lot of the same phrase repeated: “I’m not good enough to compete”. To which I basically scream-replied, “Yes! YOU ARE!” I’m not sure why people think you have to be good to compete. I consider myself a decent skydiver and my teams didn’t even do that well when you look at the scores. We averaged a 3 in VFS and a 4.5 in MFS. The average score for the Rookie FS event was between 1 and 6. The FS Beginner class had average scores between 1.3 and 4.8. These are NOT excessively high scores. If you think you can do 1-2 points on a skydive, you should probably try it! It’s fun! This idea that you have to be “good enough” to compete is silly. Competition makes you better, and in my opinion, when you don’t fly perfect, it encourages you to keep training and getting better.
I wish more people competed. I was really pleased to see how many DZs participated, totaling 19, I think? It’s awesome to have that kind of participation. I wish more teams competed in freefly though. It would have been cool to have more people to compete against, more all-in-good-fun trash talking to do. For a competition that’s so low effort to join, I wish more people had rounded up their friends for a weekend team.
One of my biggest pet peeves in skydiving (obviously not including all the safety issues that irk me), is timeliness. Skydivers aren’t known for being on time, from my experience. On a day full of fun jumps, that doesn’t bother me. I will show up for Load 1 and have a fun time jumping whether or not you’ve made it to the DZ yet that morning. But when you’re doing a team event, you have to be on time. The team needs enough time to prepare the skydives. Since this Cloud Games does offer some respite from the early start times of Nationals and the demanding schedule, it isn’t as crucial. But in this case, we were threading the needle pretty tightly to try to fit all our jumps in. I did learn for future Cloud Games, that if I want to do this many events, I basically need to clearly allocate which days belong to which events: Friday, MFS, Saturday, VFS, Sunday, other. I’m not mad, or frustrated with anyone who was late; I’m just stating what I’ve learned so I don’t have to do so much juggling in future years.
I really want to reduce mental taxation on comp days, even for Cloud Games. I have maybe 50% of the freefly dive pools memorizes. 4way FS is still mostly cemented in my gray matter, with the occasional 8way formation still bouncing around inside my noggin though. So next year, I’m going to have the letters and numbers memorized to save myself some mental load.
How do I get more people into this? What’s the best way to encourage more people to try this out? I have so many people in skydiving lamenting to me that they don’t really know where to go next, or how to progress. My answer, across the board, is to get on a skydiving team. You don’t even need to ever compete to reap the benefits. But getting on a team, doing training jumps, maybe seeking coaching, is an indisputable way to get better. You build comfort and familiarity with the flying of your teammates. You have consistency. You have ways to actually measure whether you’re improving (points, busts, inter time, time to first point). You never have to say “What are we doing on this jump?”; you can just generate a random dive from the dive pool. Teams have contributed so much to my success in skydiving, both to my actual acquisition of skills, and to my drive to improve. So, how can I convince more people that teams and competition are a really fun, rewarding way to get better at skydiving?
