Goal in reach, jumpers face new hurdles

Shikya Johnson, a 20-year-old single mother from Hyde Park with purple hair, has been through a tough stretch the last couple of years. She got pregnant. She quit school. Her mother died. And she stopped doing double Dutch jump roping, her passion since sixth grade. "It's relaxing. It's fun. It keeps me in shape," she says. "I love it."

One day last fall she woke up, looked at her trophies, and knew she had to go back. "I realized I wanted to jump again," she says. "I needed to jump again."

She rejoined her team at Solomon Lewenberg Middle School in Mattapan. Practicing four days a week after work as a sandwich maker while her grandparents watched her baby, she perfected her rope-turning and gymnastics tricks. Despite all the pressures on her, including going to night school and trying -- four times, so far -- to pass the MCAS exams, she and her four-member team, Unstoppable, qualified last month for the World Invitational Double Dutch Championships, which begin June 14 in Sumter, S.C.

And now this happens: Less than two weeks before the tournament, teammate Charda Fenner, the state speed jumping champion, doesn't think she can go. The tournament is the same day as Fenner's high school graduation, and she'll have to make a choice, says team coach Linda Diggs-Ferreira, a teacher at Lewenberg.

"We don't want to replace her," Johnson says. "There is no one else who can jump like her."

Not to mention that the team is still trying to raise $2,500 to pay for the trip.

"For me, I think I will still try to jump, but it seems like we won't go anywhere after this year," Johnson says. "There will be no more double Dutch team for me. It's kind of heartbreaking."

Lewenberg jumpers have cleared a lot of hurdles to get this far. One team member, who has bumped up against the juvenile justice system, squeezes practices between classes and two jobs. Another couldn't afford the team uniform. A student in Charlestown commutes an hour three times a week to get to practice.

"They have worked so hard," says Diggs-Ferreira, who brought the students along from undisciplined third grade novices to the agile high school athletes many of them are today. Fenner can speed-jump 312 steps in a minute, her feet fluttering so fast they are a blur. Sheena Jones can smoothly execute a front flip over Fenner's back, then do cartwheels, push-ups, and flips while between the ropes.

"Competitive double Dutch teaches children to work together positively to achieve goals, to keep a positive mental attitude, to respect yourself and others -- that if they can do this, they can do anything," Diggs-Ferreira says. "And that dreams are attainable through hard work."

Now, her usual steely confidence is starting to fade.

"Unstoppable, as of now, is not competing," she said last week, then stopped short of acknowledging total defeat. "If a miracle happens, they'll go."

It is hard to think of a competitive sport less visible than double Dutch. The sport, practiced mainly by black urban schoolgirls with a pair of $12 ropes, has no celebrated coaches or stars. Most jumpers' careers are finished by the time they graduate from high school, and there are no college-sponsored double Dutch leagues.

"They are flourishing in obscurity," says Gerald Slavet, executive producer of "From the Top," an NPR radio show and PBS television series featuring talented young musical performers.

Slavet discovered double Dutch a few months ago when he saw a movie about it on the Disney Channel and decided to hire the Lewenberg team to perform at his show's spring fund-raising gala.

"They're doing things which take an extraordinary amount of skill and practice and expertise, as well as concentration, passion, and focus. They should be celebrated the same way we celebrate young musicians," he says.

As a competitive team sport, double Dutch dates to the 1970s, when it was popularized by David Walker, a New York City police detective. Today, there are teams in most states and several countries, and a litany of arcane but inviolable rules. The left hand must turn clockwise and right hand counterclockwise. It is a violation to jump with untied shoelaces. Players lose points for tripping on a rope and more points for dropping it. Wearing braids with beads costs a lot of points. And every team entering a tournament must do a compulsory routine, a speed jumping test, and a freestyle set, with dance steps and acrobatic tricks, such as handsprings and cartwheels.

The sport is thriving in Boston. Hundreds of jumpers from across Massachusetts turned out April 28 for the state's largest double Dutch event, the 11th annual Red Auerbach Youth Foundation tournament. Unstoppable finished second in the high school division, despite the fact that Jones, who was turning rope, had a badly sprained knee. "For me, they could have done better," says Diggs-Ferreira. "Sheena was not her full self. She had to adapt to her knee being injured, which was making Charda slower."

Several of the girls say double Dutch has transformed their lives. Fenner, who lives with her mother on Seaver Street in Dorchester, says she was "antisocial" when she started jumping, but double Dutch taught her how to communicate better. Tyesha Rogers, 16, of Jamaica Plain, says it has taught her how to have patience and lose her attitude.

Attitude is something that doesn't go over well with Diggs-Ferreira. "Lord, give me strength with the children" is one of her common utterances, and she has no patience for bad teamwork. "United we stand, divided we fall!" she bellows, often. "If a turner says pick up your feet, just do it! Don't say, 'I am.' Pick up your feet. We don't have time to argue!"

"I was on the wrong road till I met Ms. Diggs, who I call mother now," says Jones, 17, who lives in Dorchester and goes to school in Hyde Park. "I picked up the wrong habits and the wrong people to be around." Jones has gotten into trouble, she says, having fistfights with other girls. One day, in sixth grade, she watched some girls practicing double Dutch and was dazzled by it. "I always wanted to be on a team, so I put my name in and I made it."

She began running laps several times a week and swinging heavy jump ropes for half an hour, getting to know the beat and rhythm and learning how to do flips. "It gives me an adrenaline rush," she says. "I love the motion of it and the people here. If Ms. Diggs did not push so hard at me, I would not have made it in life. I'd probably be in jail. Or pregnant."

Diggs-Ferreira is accustomed to dealing with social problems. "We have kids in foster care," she says. "We talk about keeping a good reputation. . . . Etiquette, definitely. We are going to the world tournament, and some of the girls have never been to a hotel or eaten at a restaurant, except maybe to a sub shop."

The question of how many girls are going to the world tournament, though, remains up in the air. Four of Diggs-Ferreira's seven teams qualified, but if Unstoppable can't attend the tournament , it will be just three teams -- Chaos, No Diggity, and Jump It Up.

Fenner doesn't want to disappoint her Unstoppable teammates, but she doesn't want to miss her graduation, scheduled for 6 p.m. the first day of the tournament, and she will not know what time her team performs until that day.

She is ranked third in her class at Community Academy of Science and Health in Hyde Park, and relatives are coming in for the ceremony. "It's my farewell to all my friends," she says. Next year she'll study nursing at Norfolk State University in Virginia, and her mother is moving to New Jersey to get away from violence in Boston.

Fenner has looked into the cost of last-minute airline tickets in the unlikely event that she is done performing early and could fly back in time for the graduation, but she can't afford them. She and the other team members have had to shell out $250 apiece for travel costs.

"Some children can barely come up with that," Diggs-Ferreira says.

Johnson says she is disappointed. Jones is putting it behind her and looking forward to next year. Still, Unstoppable hasn't totally given up. Not quite yet.

"This is why double Dutch is so good," Diggs-Ferreira says. "We're not only teaching rope-jumping; we're teaching life skills. After you dry your tears, you just keep going. You learn that if you keep plugging at anything, things will work out the way they're supposed to be."

(Correction: Because of a computer error, a byline was erroneously added to yesterday's Page One story about double dutch jump-rope. The story was written by Linda Matchan of the Globe staff.)