Big Dreams on the Big Screen
~posted 06.26.2007

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Stephanie Johnes’ obsession with jump rope began in 2003. She was a graduate student in journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill and received a class assignment to make a short film. An athlete herself, she wanted to document a sport few people knew about, and was surprised when her research turned up a national champion jump-rope team, the Bouncing Bulldogs, in Chapel Hill. “Like most people, I assumed [jump rope] was mainly a children’s game,” she says

She attended one of the Bouncing Bulldogs’ competitions and was “floored by the complexity and beauty” of the sport. “[It was] so visually dynamic [and] much more impressive than I had anticipated,” she says. “I wanted to share it with other people.”

So she followed the Bouncing Bulldogs — including Kristen Bailey, Joe Edney, Anna Holdaway, Ted Lehman and Timothy Martin, all current or incoming NC State students — for a couple months and made the 12-minute short Bouncing Bulldogs, which played at the 2005 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham.

But Johnes couldn’t let go of jump rope. While making her short film, she learned that there were actually two competitive jump-rope organizations. The Bouncing Bulldogs were members of USA Jump Rope, the sport’s governing body in the U.S. But there also was the National Double Dutch League (NDDL), with about 100,000 competitors and its own national championship. She wondered: What’s the difference between the two, and why had teams from the two organizations never competed against each other?

After earning her master’s in May 2004, Johnes drove to Columbia, S.C., to find out. There, she met and watched the Double Dutch Forces, an NDDL team. “The kids had different ropes, ... different rules, even different shoes,” she says. Whereas the Bouncing Bulldogs used four kinds of ropes, wore tennis shoes and competed in single rope and double Dutch, the Double Dutch Forces used only cloth rope, wore lightweight wrestling shoes and focused exclusively on double Dutch. NDDL teams also are not members of the International Rope Skipping Federation, jump rope’s world governing body. The biggest difference, though, was race. “There are two strands of the sport coexisting simultaneously but separately,” she says, “divided along racial lines.”

She decided to document the “disparate worlds” of the mostly white Bouncing Bulldogs and the mostly black Double Dutch Forces. As she began filming, the teams chose to compete against each other for the first time—at the 2004 Double Dutch Holiday Classic at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. The classic showcases fusion, a form of freestyling with glitzy outfits, acrobatic tricks and break-dance moves choreographed to hip-hop music. Johnes followed the teams for more than three months as they prepared for the event and for more than a year after.

She shot about 300 hours of footage and titled the feature-length documentary Doubletime. After its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March, one critic called Doubletime “the best entry in the Quirky Competition Documentary subgenre since Spellbound.” Another said it “taps into similar feelings as Spellbound,” and a third said it “echoes … Spellbound.” The big deal? Spellbound is the 2002 Oscar-nominated documentary that followed eight kids competing in the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee. It sparked a spelling-bee buzz, setting the stage for the popular Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and the 2006 film Akeelah and the Bee. In June 2006, for the first time ever, ABC aired the National Spelling Bee’s championship rounds live during primetime.

Could Doubletime have the same impact on jump rope? Johnes hopes so. “One of the goals is to give this sport, which has dreams of becoming an Olympic event, exposure,” she says. Another goal is to help bring USA Jump Rope and NDDL together to unify the two strands of the sport. Some of that has happened. Since she filmed Doubletime, the Double Dutch Forces have joined USA Jump Rope, and the Bouncing Bulldogs have competed in the NDDL-sponsored Double Dutch Holiday Classic each December. “The film is about kids from two different teams and different walks of life,” Johnes says. “But all the kids… have passion, motivation, [a] drive to succeed and a love of jump roping.”

Near the end of the film, Johnes says, several of the younger members of the Bouncing Bulldogs and the Double Dutch Forces talk about their dreams of freestyling on the Apollo Theater’s stage, where the likes of James Brown once played. Jump rope is a lot like those kids, she says. “It’s a little sport with big dreams.”

By Cherry Crayton ’01, ’03 med