SESSION VI | Sunday 2 February 2020 | 16:30 – 17:30 | Santa Clara | Panel Discussion |
Taking the holistic view on indoor skydiving as a sport is definitely a prerequisite to all efforts aiming to bring improvement to the status quo. The focus must be on grassroots development and on the top-tier competitive level at the same time. It is the whole picture that counts in the final tally. The experience over a little more than a decade tells volumes about the best of intentions falling short of fully attaining their goal.
Maybe it is the lack of collaboration – or of coordination beyond the most basic – between the different entities that have staked out a claim to the governance of indoor skydiving as a sport. Maybe it is the fact that – despite the valiant efforts by the principal stakeholders – the sport has not yet reached critical mass to sufficiently impact the media as well as the public perception. Fact is that in terms of participation, universality or any of the other criteria applied to measure popularity, indoor skydiving is still on the low end of the scale.
There is no doubt that it touches as much on the emotions of those who practice it and those who watch it as does the real thing. Aside from the relatively high costs, which are ultimately comparable to what is spent on skydiving outdoors, there is not a single valid argument against it. Lower risk factors, earlier initiation, faster progression, fewer obstacles: the advantages prevail. But that does not yet translate into a significantly higher participation than normal skydiving continues to register.
What needs to be considered to boost the popularity of indoor skydiving? How should it be pitched to the world at large? A unified nomenclature would be the one place to start. Increasing the number of opportunities for even more people to practice whatever it ends up being branded as would certainly be the next stage in the development. Efforts to up the general profile of indoor skydiving will be all the more effective if they are unified. Not to the detriment of existing commercial brands, but for the common benefit of an overarching and consolidated brand that makes the stories more coherent.
Competitions are one of the proven vehicles in the promotional campaigns for nearly every sport, always provided that they reach the corresponding target audiences. The strategies to ensure that in this day and age are well defined. And the sky is the limit when it comes to the opportunities that the digital revolution has created over recent years.
Session VI has experts in sports communications, event owners and imaginative storytellers look at the messages that need to be conveyed to the world in order to bring indoor skydiving to the next level. People who have shifted paradigms in comparable sports look at the mechanisms that can be brought into play to make it happen.
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