1988

1988 – October 8-9
Location:    Aggies Over Texas – College Station
Plane – Otter, Skyvan from Oklahoma, and a twin Beech for fun jumpers

208 registered – 8 teams and 48 fun jumpers, Jumpers were restricted to one team.

In addition to the mailouts, this year we put together a video commercial/challenge to send to out-of- state drop zones.  (Roger Pickens – film editor, Rich Conway, Tom Jenkins – producers)  If we find it, we’ll share it here!

The team of jumpers helping us grew as the meet grew.

Laird registered the name TEXXAS.

This year we had a team from Oklahoma and almost a complete team from Louisiana.

Three rounds – dives were more difficult but teams were still improving.  More practiced teams participated.

Sherry Schrimsher, who was Chairman of USPA’s Judging Committee was the judge.

Larry Hill and Bob Walker from Arizona came to check things out and jumped with the Aggie team.

We got some initial pushback for moving the meet to a smaller drop zone, but Laird and I thought it would be a good idea to test a central Texas location since the meet drew jumpers from all over the state.   It was a big airport and plenty of nearby hotels willing to give us good rates, as long as it wasn’t a football game weekend.  The Aggies did a great job of hosting.  This was the first year that all the planes came from other DZs.  We were getting solicited from AC owners to participate.  The meet generated jumps at each DZ who had a team practicing but it also took all those experienced skydivers from their DZ on the weekend of the meet.  They would prefer to have their planes flying at the meet.

Since Laird and I handled everything, we always budgeted the cost of running the meet including the pins, mailing, video, staff, printing, porta cans, ferry fees, judges, beer, banquet, awards etc. to arrive at a registration fee.  We had a lot of communication with captains who we knew were forming teams so we could estimate the number of jumpers expected and adjust our entry fees each year.  We wanted to cover our cost but keep the fee as low as possible.  If we had money left over, we would split it with the host DZ.  Our portion went to cover some of the next year’s cost.

We always had plenty of jumpers willing to help us and Chuck Stenson reached out to manufacturers, that year who donated items that we raffled off and the proceeds went to the US Team Trust Fund.  We also raffled off another slot on a WSCR load to help the Aggie team at Collegiates.

The dives were filmed by 5 freefall cameramen – Headed by VideoDude Roger Pickens.

Winning Team: WTF -O

Captain: Jack Berke