The Kennesaw Skydiving Club was founded in January 2015 at Kennesaw State University with their first event taking place in March 2015. Nothing relatively similar had ever been created on campus.
If you ask anyone, skydiving is usually one of the first things on their bucket list, but we usually don’t have any friends who are actively participating in the sport. Perhaps you just have the wrong friends.
The ultimate goal of the organization is to provide an environment that is centered around cultivating a passion for skydiving and parachuting, while giving students an opportunity to descend from thousands of feet in the air several times through the school year.
Beginners and expert skydivers come together during jumps. Even if a person has no experience skydiving, that shouldn’t stop them from joining. All the necessary training is provided along the way. Members have the option of being Accelerated Freefall (AFF) certified to jump alone, or to do a tandem jump, where a student skydiver is attached to a skydiving instructor by a harness.
Unbeknownst to many students, the skydiving location is just an hour away from the Kennesaw campus in Cedartown, Georgia. The personnel at Skydive Georgia provide all the training needed to take the big leap. This is also the primary location of where many of the jumps take place.
The president and co-founder, Andrew Fields, is an industrial and systems engineering major graduating in May.
When reflecting back on his time with his organization, Fields had nothing but positive words.
“My favorite part of skydiving is the initial adrenaline rush I experience when I jump out of the plane, as well as the awesome views I get to see in the process,” said Fields. “My favorite experience with the club so far was the first trip we took as a club in March 2015. We had a really good turnout and it was a lot of peoples’ first times jumping which was exciting.”
Unfortunately, students shouldn’t expect any jumps in the next few weeks. Just as we’re fighting to get to spring, so are these skydivers. “We are waiting to see when the weather will warm up and will decide from there, as skydiving is much more enjoyable when it isn’t cold out,” said Fields.
As of now, KSC has 63 members in the Facebook group and 28 members on the Owl Life. Numbers are only expected to grow with increased awareness of the club.
The easiest part of the process is joining. All anyone who is interested must do is either join through Owl Life or joining the group on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/kennesawskydivers/. The courage to actually step foot out of the plane and into the sky can be worked up later.
