It’s an Australian rite of passage that at some point, you bug your parents so much they give in and buy you a trampoline.
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The trampoline had pride of place in my backyard as a kid, getting dismantled only when my mum rudely decided my sister and I were too old to keep playing on it. Excuse me, mum, 21 is not too old.
Recently, this video of some kids doing death-defying tricks on their tramp circulated the internet. It a) gave me the nostalgias about my childhood tramping days and b) terrified the living fuck out of me.
The truth is, we all had moments in our childhood where our parents looked the other way for a few hours, and we went a bit rogue with our trampoline stunts. I know my sister and I definitely should have died at some point given how reckless we were with our lives on that thing, so I was sure other people I knew had similar stories.
Turns out people were even more fucked than my sister and I were. Behold, the best trampolining stories I could gather up for you.
1. Egg
The worst game I played on the trampoline was ‘egg’. For the uninformed, it involved one person curling up into a ball, arms around their shins, while two or three other people tried to bounce them off the trampoline. You were meant to remain an egg for as long as possible, and to un-egg meant you were out.
One time my sister was the egg and I double-bounced her so high, she flew off into the bushes. The funniest part was she maintained her egg shape the whole time, just thudding into the dirt. I have no idea how she didn’t break anything. – Mel
2. Basketball
I don’t remember what we named it, but basically we played a version of basketball where the corners were goals and the court was the trampoline mat. We would tackle each other into the springs as a means of defence. It led to a lot of traumatic injuries as slam dunking into springs hurts. – Jenni
3. Jump-Chasey
One day my brother did a back flip and went straight through it and landed on one leg. He was fine but the trampoline was not. RIP trampoline.
THEN we got a new trampoline and would play a jumping chasing game, bouncing from the broken trampoline to the new one. It pretty much always resulted with someone falling through the broken one. – Aaron
4. Lying Underneath
My babysitter of all people started a game where one person lay under the trampoline, and someone else jumped on it. Depending on how high the person on the tramp got, their feet got VERY close to your nose. – Mel
5. Hanging Off It
We used to stand the trampoline on its short side to it would stick up into the air, and then hang from the top of it and push it down do it fell to the ground and bounced us up. – Aiden
6. Best Catch
The worst thing we did has to be competing for the best catch (tennis ball), jumping from the trampoline into the pool. With brick edging. Capped off by the time I was 12, when I got 14 stitches across the back of my head because I overshot the jump. – Eamon
7. In The… Surf
During high school, we stole a trampoline one night, put it in the surf and jumped off it onto waves with our surfboards. We later found out it was a little girls birthday present. I still feel guilty to this day. – Matt
8. Closing Our Eyes
When I was four years old, my sisters and I used to play dare games on the trampoline and being the older siblings they told me to jump around the trampoline with my eyes closed. I wound up with my head first stuck in the side springs, legs flailing in the air. Straight to the doctors to get an x-ray and I now have a chipped shoulder for life. – Kath
9. Running At It
I always played one where you put the trampoline up on its legs and then ran at it to get it to its normal position. Sometimes you flew off the other side. – Chantelle
10. Running At It 2.0
OMG we used to get my big brother to lift the trampoline up and put it on its side so we could run into it and bounce back. Not too smart, especially once it fell forward and my friends head went through 2 springs.. he was stuck for a while. – Georgia
11. In The Pool
My sister and I once hoisted the trampoline over the pool fence, perched it precariously on the edge of the pool, and then jumped off the trampoline into the pool. It was only 1.8m deep so when we got really high, we landed quite hard onto the bottom of the pool. We also once put it IN the pool and jumped on it, but mum caught us pretty quick. – Mel
12. SA-KA-TA
My siblings and cousins played this game called SA-KA-TA where we one of us would be on the trampoline and the other 8 of us would throw large objects at the person on the trampoline to knock them over while we sang the SA KA TA theme song. – Vanna
13. Hosing It
My brother and I used to put the hose on the trampoline and slide on our knees down it like rockstars. The one time we introduced shampoo I flew off the end and wrapped myself around a tree stump. – Courtney
14. Cross Your Legs, On Your Knees…
15. With Pets
I used to put my rabbit, Stewart, on the trampoline and bounce him around. Probably not dangerous for me, but I narrowly avoided crushing him to death more times than I care to admit in a public forum. – Josie
16. Dishwashing Liquid
My entire family had a tradition of putting the garden sprinkler under the trampoline to make it super wet and then we smothered it in dishwashing liquid to make it slippery AF! There were a couple of broken bones but it didn’t stop us from doing it over & over again. – Jaimee
17. Squashing People
I never had a trampoline but once we flipped my cousin’s trampoline upside down onto him to see if it sprung back. It didn’t, we just really hurt him in the process. – Adrian
18. Kicking People
We played an unnamed game where you had to kick the person off the trampoline which I wasn’t allowed to play anymore after nearly killing my brother. – James
