S'pore Rope Skipping Story

In 1989 the Dumex National Primary School Rope Skipping Championship started with a hand full of schools. In 2002 Dumex stopped sponsoring the competition. This was doldrums for rope skipping for in 2003 the Singapore Sports Councils also stopped developing the sport. The Heart Association was also out of the picture in 2003. Expectedly the number of schools participating dropped to 35 in 2004 from about 40 in previous years.

In April 2004 AerobicsWorld founded the association for rope skipping call Rope Skipping Singapore to revive the sport. The first thing we did was to benchmark Singapore rope skippers with the rest of the world by sending athletes to the Asian and World championships. Locally, we  encouraged the Singapore Sports Council, Dumex and secondary schools to develop the sport.

By July 2005 at the National Primary School Rope Skipping Championship about half the rope skippers in the finals where coached by AerobicsWorld. We supplied competition grade skipping ropes to 13 of the top 15 ranked school teams. Clearly the sport of rope skipping was alive again thru our one and half years of work.

Upon returning from the greatly successful Asian Championship campaign in Kuala Lumpur in February 2005 we organised the first AW Masters in 2006 as part of a series of competition events to excite the rope skipping community. This was followed by the National Double Dutch Open in Feb 2007. By now about 90 percent of all competitors in rope skipping finals are coached by Rope Skipping Singapore.

With our skippers appearing regularily on TV, newspapers, radio and on NDP 2006 there is much awareness and interest in rope skipping recently. This has led to several new rope skipping events by other agencies adding vibrancy to the growing rope skipping landscape.

May 2007 update