What does a new year or new season entail for an athletic program?

The number one thing you should look for going into a new season is leadership. Over the past 35 years, the Bouncing Bulldogs program has had excellent leaders, and it all starts in the summer. During what many call the off-season–June through September for the Bulldogs–you should focus on the athletes who show up on a high level. You do this to discover who the high school leaders will be during the new season. Then, for the next 30 days, I search for captains; captains should be two strong, senior leaders who consistently reflect the program’s mission statement and 10 core values. Once your leadership and captains are in place, you should focus on team chemistry for around 90 days. Ultimately, your team’s chemistry is dependent on the strength of your leadership. During this process, I also like to plan at least one show per week. Doing this gives us time to get away from the gym and truly see the growth of individual athletes. Traveling any distance gives you time to see how your team members interact with each other during bus rides, sharing meals, and performing. All of these situations allow you to observe people’s personalities as well as the growth of your team’s chemistry. 
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Many coaches are challenged at the start of a new season because their athletes change drastically over the off-season. After watching teenagers change over numerous summers, I have learned to keep the mission statement and core values of the program close during the beginning of the season. I continually remind the jumpers that the program is designed to improve their physical, emotional, social, and academic well-being…not just their jump rope skills. Then again, I have to reinforce the core values early on to get the whole team on the same page. For me, everything starts with discipline. I learned the importance of discipline from many of my mentors, but I love how the great Dean Smith said, “Your freedom in life comes from discipline.” Once you’ve weaved in your core principles and made sure those in leadership roles hold the same standards as you, then you will have a solid foundation to make a great year. Finally, as integral as those first months of your season are, it’s important to use the winter break to evaluate your team’s progress in all of the above aspects as you head into January. 

We ended the 2017-2018 season with 150 team members, most of whom will be returning as we begin a new season. Each year, the Bouncing Bulldogs have a theme reinforced at every practice and class session.

Our previous theme was community outreach, and a big focus will continue to be on community outreach moving forward. The Bulldogs have been competing for a long time, but we also want to make more direct efforts to spread the sport of jump rope in communities with boys and girls who are interested in learning but may not have the resources.
               
Based on my experience as a PE teacher, it was instilled in me to teach boys and girls the value of skill development and movement education. My focus was on making sure that boys and girls were learning as many skills as they could learn throughout the early years of the program’s history. Now, my focus has shifted. My goal is to empower each jumper to gain the ability to take the skills they are learning and understand how to teach those skills to others. Weaving into skills with the rope, now our focus is to understand all the values you can learn from participating in a physical activity like jump rope.

A jump roper can teach skills all day, but it is also important to recognize and express the benefits of jump rope regarding physical literacy. I see a shift in our program where the thought process is becoming more about serving others with the knowledge we have, and we are open to the knowledge others will share with us. A person who picks up a jump rope and starts learning is going to enhance their physical fitness. But they are also going to enhance their character development over time when it comes to discipline, relationships and communication.

When choosing a theme, I have to ask myself as a coach, what is the personality trait of this year’s team? You have to be very aware of the values you are bringing into an environment, so how can we take all of the unique personalities within the program and bring them together with a theme?
With these considerations in mind, our theme for the 2018-2019 season is: bring your value.

​Every jumper possesses a unique value and possesses a responsibility to work to better recognize their own value and share it with the world. Jumpers don’t just come to practice to be present. Jumpers come to practice to discover their value, and they can go home and share with their families why they go to practice every day as well as what they learned. They can answer the question: what did you learn that will enhance your values and make you a better person?

The past twenty-nine years have been an unbelievable journey!  When we started as a jump rope demonstration team at Hope Valley Elementary School in Durham we only had sixteen jumpers and we held tryouts at the beginning of each school year.  Now, we have 157 jumpers on our competition team and another 200 jumpers on our club team. 

My wife Patricia and I are grateful for the thousands of jumpers and hundreds of families who have participated in the various programs we have conducted throughout the years.  The growth of the Bouncing Bulldogs Program has continued because of the high level of community support, especially from dedicated parents and grandparents.  The Bouncing Bulldogs has jumpers participating in our programs from thirty different schools in multiple counties of North Carolina.  Additionally, these jumpers come from nineteen different countries throughout the world.  In some cases, families have driven forty-five miles one-way to practice, or flown hundreds of miles to participate in one of our camps.  This level of commitment is what makes our program so special to many people around the world.

The Bouncing Bulldogs Community Outreach Initiative is changing many lives locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.  We are working with current jumpers in our program to think of more ways to engage children, youth, and adolescents in fun, physical activities, incorporating the use of ropes.  In order to accomplish this, we want all our jumpers to become excellent teachers and ambassadors for the sport of jump rope.  To teach is to learn twice, according to Chines poet and philosopher Lao Tzu.  We in the Bouncing Bulldogs program agree with this philosophy. 

The Bouncing Bulldogs Community Center will be the first jump rope gym in the world erected from the ground up, born from a vision to create a space where young minds could continue to grow and train their bodies using the art and science of jump rope.  Our new Bouncing Bulldogs home will be a place where people from around the world can share in our vision to use the rope to connect people from different walks of life, helping them to grown physically, socially, emotionally, and intellectually.  We are thankful to all the people worldwide who have helped us to fulfill this dream.  Thank you for helping us to make the world a better place. 
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JUMP FORWARD! 

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​The Bouncing Bulldogs have so much to look forward to as we head into the 2016-2017 season, and as always, I'm very excited about the new year. I’m most excited about our new senior leadership because the 2016-2017 team will only be as good as our senior leaders.

Looking back over the past three decades, we’ve always had great leadership, and I think this year’s team could be the best ever. The personality traits the seniors possess are such that they don't make much noise verbally, but their actions have always spoken for them. As a coach, I have great respect for people who lead by their actions.

As we jump forward into a new season, the most exciting news for the Bulldogs has been breaking ground to initiate the construction of the Bouncing Bulldogs Community Center, which will allow us to expand and help more kids in our community. The building is slated to be completed by March of 2017 and will be the first ever jump rope gym built from scratch! We are grateful for the fact that over 480 individuals from all over the US have donated to helping us build our new gym. However, the program is still in need of funds. If a person would like to contribute, they may contact us.

From late August to December is a time when we develop our team chemistry. This team chemistry phase is the first of four phases throughout the year and is key because a successful year depends on a whether a program’s foundation is built with strong team chemistry. Throughout the fall and winter months, from our annual workshop in November until the beginning of February, our program engages in numerous performances all over the US. This phase of the season is a time to focus on community outreach as the Bouncing Bulldogs share our passion for jump rope with others and inspire people using the jump rope as a vehicle. We start focusing on putting groups together for competition from February to early May, and we train at the highest level during the season’s fourth and final phase.
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To all of our friends and supporters around the world who think I may be slowing down after three decades of leading the Bouncing Bulldogs program: I am more energized than ever heading into the new year, so watch out! I would also like to thank my wife, Mrs. Fredrick, for supporting me in this role as a coach. Without her, none of this would be possible!

COACH K. LEE​

I am very appreciative of the Bouncing Bulldogs organization for helping to mold me into 
the woman I am today. I have been a member of the Bulldogs either as a jumper or a coach for 25 years. The lessons learned throughout my years transcend beyond the sport. I am currently working as a physical therapist in an orthopedics outpatient clinic in Greensboro, North Carolina. Somehow, my experiences with the Bulldogs always appear in conversation with my patients. Recently, I have treated many Veterans who were stationed overseas, and we often share and compare places we’ve traveled. Patients comment on my ability to listen, empathize, and then organize a plan of action. I learned these important skills from peer-teaching within our team and teaching others at various workshops across the nation and around the world. It is important in life to be able to relate to others on a personal level no matter their social, physical, racial, or economic background. 

School never came easy to me. I was never the smartest in my class, never received straight A’s on every report card, and had to apply two years in a row to get into the Duke University Physical Therapy Department. But Coach Fredrick always told me, “Hard work will beat talent any day.” To this day, I will not let anyone outwork me in whatever I do. In school and in life, I am not afraid to ask questions or to say I don’t know the answer. If I do not know the answer, I will not give up until I find the answer.  I learned perseverance, discipline, organization, humility, and motivation through jump rope. My journey has not been easy and has come with both successes and failures. Therefore, I read the following quote weekly by Denis Waitley, “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”

For 25 years, the Chapel Hill-Durham based Bouncing Bulldogs have hosted the North Carolina Rope Skipping Workshop.  Throughout those years, many individuals, groups, organizations and corporations have contributed to the success of the workshop and its impact on young people locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.  The Bouncing Bulldogs organization is grateful to all who have been a part of the workshop and its success. 

Though the workshop is designed to promote the physical activity and sport of jump rope through the teaching of skills, it has turned into so much more.  Perhaps the most significant outgrowth of the NC Rope Skipping Workshop has been the many relationships that have been formed among participants, spectators and supporters of jump rope.  In jump rope, the community of jumpers is known for the exchange of pins, a symbol of unity and camaraderie.  The annual NC Rope Skipping Workshop, held on the first Saturday of November each year, has produced a symbol of unity among its own community, the quality of the networks and relationships that have been established at this prestigious, annual event.

I look forward to being a part of the 25th Anniversary Workshop taking place on Saturday November 1, 2014 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and hope that many new, positive relationships will be formed at an event that has a simple goal yet a profound impact.