So, in 2014, Williams co-founded Team Blackstar, for skydivers of color, which now has about 270 members. She longed to belong to a skydiving group where she could feel completely comfortable, with people who looked more like her. Williams received her certification after about half a dozen jumps on her own but with an instructor close by, then became licensed after 25 solo jumps.īut the longer she was in the sport, the more she felt isolated, both by how she was treated (not unkindly, but with ignorance) and by never feeling wholly part of the community. She was about to move from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Fort Rucker, Alabama, and decided to become a licensed skydiver. “I didn’t know there were people who jumped on the weekends just for fun,” she added, “and that there was an entire community.” Then she met a friend of a friend who was a skydiver “and that blew my mind,” Williams said. “I thought it was something people did just one time,” she said. She loved it but didn’t plan to continue. Her first jump, a tandem, was on her 25th birthday. “A lot of my friends were getting motorcycles,” she said. When she returned from Iraq, she was looking for something exciting to try.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |