GeeTramp meetup

Quite possibly the wettest weekend in July was what we got for the first ever GeeTramp meetup. It was conveniently held at Jump Avondale – which seems to be our second home at the moment.

This meetup was a promotional event run by an Australasian company named GeeTramp (also known as webandwarehouse). It was entirely organised through Instagram. Fin was one of about 30 boys (yes, all boys – c’mon girls get amongst it!) selected who came along. What a big weekend!

Prep. We went down to Jump on Friday night ‘till about 10:30pm (along with Henry Douglas and Aeron Stokes) and again on Saturday morning to help put up the 4 big GeeTramp trampolines with nets in the Parkour Pit.

The first day.  On Saturday night the boys were all given t-shirts, food and free use of the new trampolines and Jump for 5 hours from 5-10pm. Jump allowed us to do another Sausage Sizzle so we loaded up the trailer yet again and Nana and Poppa (our star supporters) braved the cold wind and rain to sell the rest of our tasty Gladstone Butchery sausages. Some wild tricks were thrown down and Fin was happy as he did a kaboom full-full. AJ Ross and Max McQuoid stayed at our house (and got very little sleep). There may have even been a late night trip to McDs and a helium balloon involved.

The second day.   Sunday morning we headed back down to Jump at 10am for 4 more hours. GeeTramp also brought along their new mini tramp which saw some amazing acrobatic stuff going down. At 2pm everybody drifted off home to get some well-deserved rest. Ali stayed back until 6pm to help disassemble all the trampolines and pack them all up to go to some lucky kids.

Fin’s head was quite literally spinning after little-to-no sleep and such an intense couple of days. Fun but extremely tiring. Great prep for the EU GTGames in terms of learning how to manage his rest, nutrition and energy expenditure. Bananas, apples and paracetamol might have been our biggest learn from the weekend!

A few kids in NZ actually received free trampolines as part of being ‘GeeTramp brand ambassadors’. To become an ambassador you had to have minimum 5000k followers on Instagram and basically live your life on Instagram flipping, commenting and generally promoting yourself. Lucky kids as those trampolines are nice trampolines.

Fin certainly didn’t fit that criteria as he is more chilled on Instagram and doesn’t chase after notoriety  – preferring to flip for the love of it and post when he feels like it rather than pushing for media coverage, sponsorship or followers. Not exactly an advertiser’s dream poster boy but we are happy he’s following his own path.

However, GeeTramp approached us with this incredibly generous act to Fin of offering a trampoline up for auction and giving him the proceeds. The auction was held on Instagram but the top bidder was a no-show in the end on Sunday and didn’t sell – luckily really, as bidding only got to $660 which was really too low for a g-tramp of this kind. Now the tramp is on auction here at TradeMe.

Only two weeks until we fly to Denmark now!

 

 

Supporter T-shirt

Some humans are just born generous!

Thank you so much.

Fin will wear this t-shirt in Denmark.  If you want to put your name on his t-shirt let us know…

Lights Out went off!

Our Lights Out fundraiser was a total success – in the end! But what a learning curve it was…

In the lead up to the Lights Out event we felt intensely anxious. At two weeks before the event ticket sales were worryingly sluggish, we’d only sold about 20 actual tickets out of 120 – and we knew we had to pay a $1000 rental to Jump for the evening so we were panicking that we weren’t going to break even, let alone make funds. People were keen, but not keen to buy the tickets early.

It felt uncomfortable asking friends and workmates to support us. We carted tickets, flyers and posters (and blu tac!) around to every location we could think of and started shamefacedly bombarding our social networks. We had to remake our posters about 6 times, being advertising novices we kept leaving details off the posters or people would comment about how we should include different things to what we’d included.

We spent a lot of time at Jump Avondale and online to Jump’s exceedingly patient managing director discussing sales and talking about how the event would go. The staff were incredibly helpful, reassuring and very willing – an amazing bunch of people to work alongside!

Then came the final week. Eating at our dining table went out the window as the donated raffle prizes arrived. Every single prize that sat on our table we wanted to keep for ourselves – they were all so good. Laura from Gladstone Butchery arrived with massive bags of sausages – they’d even precooked them, making our lives that much easier. Truly generous people. Fin convinced us to make twice as many lolly bags as we had done which was surprisingly time consuming to put together. Bread, raffle books, drinks, napkins, and sauces were bought but still we weren’t sure of numbers.

Then in true NZ style ticket sales tumbled in at the last minute. At one point, on the last day before the event, the sales were looking so good that we thought people might miss out. Nobody missed out in the end though but we came so close. We sold so many tickets that we were only 4 tickets away from a sellout.

After many weeks of planning the evening appeared and the weather was brutally cold, but at least it wasn’t raining. Weary family arrived on our doorstep after long weeks of work to come help out. Jackets and beanies were packed and the trailer with the BBQ was hitched onto the car.

People arrived. They were all our people! People we hadn’t seen for ages and people we saw every day, people who were friends of our people. It was a little like a wedding where one lines up to hug the bride and groom! It was so nice to see everyone. Julie Davies helped put wristbands on everyone (surprisingly difficult to do quickly!) as we worked our way through the handling of different types of ticket purchases.

Ali, Chad Davies, Nana & Poppa, Dave & Marta, and Janet Williams sold sausages, raffle tickets, drinks and lollies. What a crew.

The Lights were out, the music was on and the trampolines were populated. Bounce time. The bouncers were hot and the rest of us standing around were freezing.

Rosebank Kitchen next door saw an extra influx of people for an hour or so which was a mighty fine way to warm up in our opinions!

We had to get over our microphone shyness and announce the raffle. The raffle took a while to draw but it was worth it as so many people won prizes and it was pretty cool how people got to choose what they wanted from the selection. Nana & Poppa graciously threw their winning ticket away so another person could have a chance. Fin even did a short flipping display over on the Olympic tramps which surprised us all.

And then suddenly it was all over! Time to pack up and shuffle off. We packed down and loaded the BBQ back onto the trailer, cleaned up around Jump and headed home. We only had one extra staying with us tonight – Max McQuoid.

We were tired but happy, cold but energised and very, very curious to see if we’d made any money to go towards Fin’s trip. It took a while to add all the bits together from online sales, Jump sales, cash sales, food and raffle sales and try to subtract things like the petty cash and settle up with Jump costs. In the end the evening’s net amount came in at $1659.00!

We spent the money immediately on Fin’s airfare (his airfare cost $2642 as, quite inconveniently, at 13 years old he is a full adult fare).

Thank you everyone who came – you have contributed to getting Fin to his competition!

 

NB: Terrible photos sorry! The lights were out funnily enough.

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining us!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

In April Findlay competed and won the NZ Youth Division of the NZ GTramp Champs hosted by GRT and held at JumpNZ.

Going into the competition Fin knew that his age group didn’t qualify for the invitation to the GT Games so he’d thought he’d simply won a prize package but Greg Roe and Trish McGreer of GRT were so impressed with Fin’s performance that they invited him to compete in the World competition.

That means he is now being sent to compete in Denmark this August to represent NZ for trampolining in the world G-Tramp Games 2018.

The G-Tramp games are sort of like the Olympic Games for G-Tramp athletes. Gtramp is trampolining but more in the bracket of an extreme sport as it is more freestyle, more tricking and less form focussed than gymnastic trampolining. It originated from backyard garden trampolines (hence g-tramp) but has now grown into a massively popular worldwide sport.

Additionally Fin has also been invited to become a GRT crew member – a coveted title within his group of flipping friends.

We are fundraising to get him to Denmark and our major event is going to be a ‘Lights Out’ night at Jump Avondale. This event from 7-9pm is basically a discounted 2 hour jump session with a party atmosphere (lights out, music on). Adults can either jump too or hang out with other non-jumpers as we’re doing a sausage sizzle/raffle etc 😊. Non-jumpers don’t need tickets – only those going on the trampoline area need tickets. You might like to bring a bit of extra cash if you’d like a sausage, soft drink or a raffle ticket for the mint raffle prizes.

Raffle Prizes

 

 

1. Schwarzkopf Haircare Products – donated by Henkel Beauty Care
2. New World $100 voucher – donated by New World Victoria Park
3. Family Pass to Jump ($60) – donated by JumpNZ
4. Single pass to Jump ($17) – donated by JumpNZ
5. Single pass to Jump ($17) – donated by JumpNZ
6. Meat pack – donated by Gladstone Butchery Parnell
7. Meat pack – donated by Gladstone Butchery Parnell
8. Rosebank Coffee & Kitchen $50 voucher – donated by Rosebank Coffee & Kitchen
9. Shure earphones ($139 value each) – donated by NSL
10. Shure earphones ($139 value each) – donated by NSL
11. Black Gravitated Equations #GRT No Excuses long sleeve t-shirt – donated by Gravitated Equations & GRT
12. Black Gravitated Equations #GRT No Excuses long sleeve t-shirt – donated by Gravitated Equations & GRT
13. Glacier Gravitated Equations t-shirt –  donated by Gravitated Equations & GRT
14. Purple Gravitated Equations t-shirt –  donated by Gravitated Equations & GRT
15. Grey Gravitated Equations t-shirt –  donated by Gravitated Equations & GRT

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Newspaper article 23 May 2018