Órlaith Geary had a problem. Not too serious, perhaps, in the scheme of things, but not insignificant either. The third-year medicine student knew she would be late for class, the result of a very important training session. She advised those in charge of her predicament. “They were like, ‘Oh yeah that’s fine, what’s the training for?’” She laughs, almost sheepish. “And I was like, ‘trampolining’. And they just gave me the weirdest look ever. And you have to be like, ‘No no, it’s a real sport, here’s a video’. And they kind of gain respect once they have a look at what you do, but initially everyone’s like…” She breaks off, looks around at her teammates. All are nodding in recognition. It’s a familiar issue.
Geary, Competitions Officer of Dublin University Trampoline Club, sits in front of me on a drizzly Costa Thursday, empty coffee cup rolling around in front of her, a remnant of the table’s previous inhabitants. Squashed on either side are Jane Taylor and Kim Sheehan-Thomas, Webmaster and “random member” respectively. Club Captain Dave Woods perches beside me, frequently forced by a troublesome cough to the crook of his own elbow. Geary continues: “You say to people, ‘I do trampolining’, and they kind of laugh at you.” Is that frustrating? “Yeah. Sometimes.”
Taylor jumps in. It’s charming, how the four chatter over each other, a testament to the commonality of experience in the club. “It’s a skill. It is a skill.”
They’re not here, though, to vent their frustrations at the lack of recognition they too often experience as members of Trinity’s trampoline club. Far from it. If there is a narrative here, it is a positive one, albeit perhaps with qualifications. “We’ve done really well in competitions, we’ve surprised ourselves a little”, Woods offers at one point. His goal for the year, he says, was “stability”, after a “couple of rough years a few years ago”. He is quick to compliment Aideen Mallon, last year’s captain, for “pulling the club together”. Woods has attempted to consolidate the club’s newfound unity, and it seems, from this interview at least, that he has succeeded.
The perennial challenge for every “niche” sports club in Trinity is that of profile. Fated, by the nature of the sports they purvey, to spend their time striving for growth, these clubs must show creativity and innovation if they are to make any stab at thriving in what is a crowded sporting market in College. The tack adopted by Woods and DU Trampoline is that “we’re really as you want it. If you join in the beginning and you’re like, “oh, I just want to come once a month and just have a quick go, up and down”, that’s fine. We don’t mind. If you want to go – to use the phrase – balls to the wall, to go super at it and be like, “I am going to be an elite gymnast”, you can do that too. Whatever you want to do.” I glance around the table at more vigorous nodding. Sheehan-Thomas sums it up: “There’s a core of sort of people that generally always come [to training], and then there’s people who float in and out.”
Trinity’s trampoliners, then, are trying to “be both”. Contained within the club are top-quality athletes such as head-coach Brian Hearns, who competes at Elite Pro level, as well as those whose primary interest is to “hang out and have a good time”. It’s a difficult feat, to cover simultaneously the bases of accessibility and high-level competition, but it’s one the club’s members set great store by. And, given their successes this year, it seems they’re not doing a bad job.
The Irish Student Trampolining Open takes place in Galway this weekend. It will draw university trampoliners from all over Ireland and Europe. Geary wonders aloud whether it’s the biggest competition of its kind on the continent. Woods declares with a grin that it’s the “Trinity Ball of trampolining competitions”. Now is a good time to take stock. All heads turn to Geary, who smiles, slightly embarrassed: “I suppose I am comps officer.”
She tells me about varsities – “It’s great for freshers to get a bit of exposure to it … and we did quite well” – and, with a beam, about the club’s trip to Edinburgh in February for the Scottish Student Trampolining Open: “That was great craic. It’s a lot harder than the Irish competitions, because you have a lot of British clubs who seem to be quite a lot more competitive. But we had Aideen, who got silver.” And most recently? “We had Colours a couple of weeks ago, where we beat UCD – by a lot.” She allows herself a smile at the memory, and Woods, emerging from a bout of coughing, recommences. “It’s our third year running beating them by quite a lot”, he confirms. “We got clean sweeps in a load of categories.”
A good season overall then? “Yeah, definitely.”
No club, however, is perfect. Are there areas to improve on? Woods, as captain, has thought a lot about this question. “It would be really nice to get, like you were saying, the awareness of the club as more of a sport”, he asserts. “One thing I would like to see, probably a long way down the line, is to move from just trampoline to trampoline and gymnastics. Because we don’t have the equipment or coaches to do that. So it would be nice to get beyond that eventually, but I think that is a ways down the line. It would require constitutional changes, and a lot of dealing with DUCAC. In the near future, just, as I was saying, more awareness of trampolining as being a sport and not just a novelty.”
The club’s relationship with DUCAC, or Dublin University Central Athletic Club, is an area I am particularly keen to explore. They wouldn’t be the first club to complain about DUCAC. A momentary, deafening silence. “[My experience] has been mixed, depending on who I’m dealing with”, Woods answers, after a collection of his thoughts. “When I actually manage to get someone face to face it’s usually fine, but half the time that’s the battle. Just trying to say, ‘Can I sit you down, and talk to you about whatever the problem is’. Because chasing around emails never seems to work, and there’s certain people, you’d email them and you’d need something done as soon as possible. And they email you back a week later saying ‘Oh sorry I was on holiday’.”
It’s a depressingly familiar story – double-bookings and last-minute cancellations. “I feel like it’s mostly the same problems over and over again”, Geary offers, before lapsing into silence.
For DU Trampoline though, the main emotion is excitement. At the time of this article’s publication, their athletes will most likely be finished with this year’s open. It will be a benchmark, a litmus test for how far they have come technically, competing against high-quality outfits from across Europe. An extra session was added to the club’s regimen in advance of the competition, and a former Canadian coach took Trinity’s trampoliners for a few hours of training at a “slightly higher level”. The open, though, is so hotly-anticipated mostly because it’s “just great fun”.
Geary and Woods are qualified coaches as well as athletes, and Taylor is a former gymnastics coach, so it’s safe to say they all know what they’re doing. The challenge now is to bring trampoline to the next level. Geary tells me, with forgivable pride, that the sport has been a feature of the Olympics “since 2000”, but it is still, they all admit, a primarily collegiate sport. And even then it is not always recognised for the challenging and skilful sport it is. So for Trinity’s trampoliners, the goal is to hammer into the public consciousness, by hook or by crook, that trampolining is a high-level sport. Taylor chuckles. “And it is not just bouncing around on a trampoline.”
