And just like that, another year has passed. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited for 2022. For many of us in the U.S., winter is time for either jump vacations to warmer climates or planning the skydiving year! On the personal side, I’ve been planning what sort of jumping I want to get up to this year and deciding if there is anything new I want to try. On the USPA side, I’ve been working with each department head to look at what we accomplished last year, and what we want to set our eyes on for 2022.
There isn’t enough room on this page to dive into everything, but here are a few highlights from different areas.
Sport Promotion and Communications—We’ve hit this area like a storm in 2021, and we’re going to hit it even harder in 2022! Personally, I hated that the only time I saw stories about skydiving in the news was when someone tragically died. There is so much more that our community and sport offer to the world than headlines about our darkest hours. The truth is, I have come to the sad realization that I won’t be successful in overcoming the sensationalizing of death in the media. But what we can do is flood the world with the good stories about our sport: our competitors winning medals, our top athletes breaking records, our everyday skydivers working hard to support their local communities. We have and will continue to flood the world with how amazing you all are.
Membership Services—It is no hollow statement when I say that this organizations exists for you and because of you. We will constantly strive to provide you with better services and resources. This year, we will be revamping our back-end database. This should be invisible to you, but you will notice that our new online presence will make uspa.org more functional, easier to navigate and a better resource. These changes will also allow us to be more nimble in the ever-changing online environment.
Safety and Training—At headquarters, these two items have long been lumped together. As you can imagine, when there are safety emergencies that we need to address, the proactive training endeavors quickly and unfortunately take a back seat. Well, we owe those initiatives more. This year, we’re investing more time and effort into those training-related programs, because we realize that the more we put into training upfront, the less time we’ll need to spend fixing problems later.
U.S. Parachute Team—Financial support for our U.S. Parachute Team in 2021 was great. Between the various mechanisms we currently have in place, we were able to support our team to the tune of around $100,000 for the world championships in Siberia. Where does all that money come from? Well, simply put, it comes from you, from your generosity and desire to see our U.S. Parachute Team standing on the podium and hear our national anthem play. We’ve relaunched usparachuteteam.org in order to allow discipline-specific donations for those who wish to do so. We’re also developing a long-term plan for bringing our USPT Trust Fund to where it can provide an unprecedented level of support to our athletes.
More on all of these and other endeavors as we make our way through the year. With the risk of sounding repetitive, I’m excited for what this year holds for USPA and our sport!