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Former Ohio State jump roper develops measurement system for competitions

BRANDON KLEIN
Special to the Legal News

Published: February 10, 2020

Ohio State alumna Tori Boggs has quite the resume as a professional jump rope performer.
Boggs, who has jumped rope competitively since was five years old, has nearly 30 world titles, 20 world records and multiple media appearances, including on the Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Boggs' latest efforts in the jump rope world are more entrepreneurial with the founding of Tally Jump. The company offers a product to provide an accurate measure when jump roping, including counts and speed.
In typical competitions, judges have to manually measure these figures that becomes more challenging for different types of contests including ones that involve jumpers going as fast as they can.
"There's always a chance of human error," Boggs said.
Boggs founded the company with the help of a former teammate's husband, who worked as a business developer. The two had talked about ways to develop a product that could automate the process.
They thought outside of the box by coming up with a counting device that can be inserted into the laces of the shoe instead of integrating the technology into the jump rope.
The latter idea had challenges because competitors have their own preferences to what jump ropes they use. The counter device sends the counts to the user's smartphone.
The startup raised 40,000 euros in Kickstarter campaign to develop the counter device in France. The first shipments were sent out by early 2018 and the technology debut in a competition in Norway last year. Boggs' goal is to get more jump rope competitions to adopt the technology and hopefully help the sport's journey to enter the Olympics.
"(The) jump rope community is really supportive. They love this idea," Boggs said.
In addition, the technology can be used to help the general fitness public. Competitors and people who work out can train alone without relying on someone to count the number of jumps. Boggs said it become cumbersome task when a performer starts counting in the triple digits.
Boggs was born in Ohio but grew up in Parkersburg, W. Va. She received a full academic scholarship to attend OSU and helped spearhead the creation of its competitive jump rope program. Boggs said she was surprised that a city of Columbus' size didn't have some kind of jump rope club at the time.
She started OSU's club in 2013 with some friends, participating in local events such as the Arnold Sports Festival and OSU football pre-game events.
She eventually helped other universities start their own clubs, which led to a national collegiate jump rope competition that OSU hosted for two years. This year's competition takes place at the University of North Carolina early next month.
Boggs studied industrial design at OSU and was a pre-medicine student. And she hopes to expand her resume with plans to go to medical school at OSU in the future.
But her story parallels with much of jump rope's growth as a competitive sport as new governing bodies emerge and more than 60 countries have competitors.
"(The) rules have been under evolution for many years," Boggs said. She this year is big for the sport for it will kind of start the process to determine what the rules will be if it becomes an Olympic sport. She hopes her product will help with tallying the jumps.
"I hope that someday this system will be able to not have that human error," she said.
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