A brother and sister team in my "grades 8-12" after school and summer program one year were regional Double Dutch Champions as a duo and also winners with a group of friends in another, larger team. The duo was also involved regularly in dance and step team competitions and these activites improved their Double Dutch techniques over time and provided a larger repertoire of moves.

Through my class, I learned that Double Dutch had become a feature (still popular today) at the Inner City Games in Columbus, Ohio, as well as at local and regional competitions held in the city's large sports venues. I was fortunate enough to witness awe-inspiring precision stunts, such as two youth running full tilt at each other from the opposite sides of the gym and each executing a front flip into the air in the middle of the two spinning jump ropes and beginning skipping the ropes without missing a beat.

This Double Dutch activity includes art, science, and sport and the people that participate in it are highly accomplished and coordinated. McDonald's and other large corporations are sponsors of Double Dutch teams nationwide in America.

Ancient Chinese History

Double Dutch is not new. Like many sports, Double Dutch is traced back to China, Phoenicia, and Egypt.

In Egypt, children and youth used two ropes made of vines for complex jumping games. Little is known about the Phoenician games related to this, except as portrayed in some more isolated pieces of ancient artwork. However, some archeologists and cultural anthropologists feel that these rope games arose from out of Phoenician fishing rope handling techniques, just as crocheting originated from fish net making.

The Chinese used a different material for rope.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a precursor of Double Dutch in Ohio was called by elementary school children "Chinese Jump Rope", which they learned from Chinese exchange students that had learned the game from centuries-old family traditions.

The activity began with long chains of rubber bands tied together to form two ropes that were each 8-10 feet long.

Two people held the ends of the rubber ropes, but very close to the ground, about 6 inches above the pavement of the school yard. The ropes were not spun at first, but quickly touched to the ground about 8" apart, then 12" in the air about 8" apart, onto the ground and 8" apart, in the air 12" high and 12" out on both sides, and the pattern repeated faster and faster. When the ropes were close together, the jumpers feet were to touch on the ground outside the ropes and when the ropes were apart, the feet were to touch inside. If INSIDE the ropes, the feet of one person were to alternate by landing side-by-side, right in front of left, left in front of right, just the right foot and just the left foot. Two jumpers together tried to do the same patterns. Hand stands and back flips were added. More people were jumping in, up to six and eight at a time.

Different footwork was used on the outside of the ropes, including one-foot and two-foot techniques. After a certain amount of time, the ropes would start spinning and kids developed their own patterns and skills and began using regular American jump ropes instead of rubber bands in Ohio and much ot the Eastern US. Then McDonalds decision makers saw it and thought it was a great sport for urban youth in the 1970s and began sponsoring school teams and local competitions. The Midwest's Double Dutch phenomenon took off in popularity after it became a success in New York and the Eastern US.

The 21st century "speed" Double Dutch event is fairly new. Formerly, the sport was based on gymnastics, which is Freestyle today.

In Reno, Nevada, several groups of teens perform Double Dutch on roller blades.

Jumping with one and two ropes was introduced into the Western Hemisphere in what is now the Eastern US by colonists from Holland [the Dutch].

The time was the 1600s, when Euorpeans began settling America. Nothing is written about what the Native Americans thought of seeing colonists skipping ropes. One can only imagine.

The game that became "Double Dutch" stayed in the eastern regions of the continent, growing more popular in the Dutch areas of New York (New Amsterdam), and spreading slowly to the Midwest in the 19th-20th century.

The English settlers in the New World began using the negative nickname "Double Dutch" to indicate anything they did not understand about Holland and the Dutch Colonists, especially their speech. The English later called another jump rope game "Double Irish" as a negative nickname in the same way. Doubletalk, Double Dutch, and Double Irish have all been insults.

By the 1890s, called "The Gay Nineties", girls' fashions began rising above the ankles in skirts that were a bit shorter than floor length. This allowed young women the flexibility to jump rope as the boys did. Soon, rope jumping became "a girl's game."

The school girls used their usual hand-clapping games while jumping rope. When they became proficient at this, they added fancier foot work and other tricks as their skirts continued to decrease in length over time.

Both black and white girls in America played Double Dutch as a game before it became a sport, but it is referred to sometimes as the "Black Girls Game" by those that do not realize that all genders and races participate, or that their numbers are increasing in the 21st century.

Double Dutch surged after World War II, but people lost interest in it in the 1950s-1960s as the Space Age took the world's attention toward gagetry and electronics. Ropes were "quaint" or "old hat" or "boring" when compared to rocketry and space exploration. Amerca wanted to compete with the Russians with more techologically advanced activities than jumping rope as a sport.

McDonalds in NYC dicovered youth playing interesting Double Dutch in Central Park in the early 1970s and planned to use it in commericals to target urban populations; they alao planned to sponsor tournaments. In 1973, Mr. Ulysses Williams, NYPD, began to use Double Dutch in his youth outreach program that was called Rope, not Dope, a play on the boxing term "rope a dope" -- Boxing is a big youth activity for Police Athletic Leagues across the nation.

About the same time Mr. David Walker, Harlem police detective of the NYPD, got involved with Harlem youth activites. Walker started an annual tournament at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1974 and coached Double Dutch into a national sport.

At the same time in the late 1960s - eary 1970s, Richard Cendali was training for football in Denver Colorado and found that rope skipping could substitute for running strairs in the stadium in bad weather. He added fancy moves and by the mid-1970s, he'd taught students of his own to fancy-skip rope, formed a Dmeonstration Team and began traveling the world with it.

McDonalds has been a major sponsor of Double Dutch nationally for decades.

McDonald's, Cendali, Williams, and Walker have developed modern-day Double Dutch training and competition internationally.