Field Notes: i-Trampoline Hawaii

Field Notes explores Honolulu’s vibrant and varied scenes and subcultures. This month: Hawaii’s only trampoline park.

WHAT IT IS

The iTrampoline “indoor family fun park” is a 28,000-square-foot warehouse in an industrial part of Kapolei, where trampolines cover half the floor space and part of the walls. You can literally bounce off the walls there. The main features are:

• Two trampoline dodgeball courts, where friends hurl balls at each other with vicious, but mostly harmless, force.
• A trampoline slam-dunk basketball court, where even short people get NBA-like hang time.
• A big, five-foot-deep pit filled with foam blocks and entered, ideally, after a high bounce off a trampoline, or a ricochet off a trampoline-covered wall.
• A main court consisting of 59 trampolines, positioned side by side, an arrangement that allows jumpers to kangaroo from one trampoline to the next, all the way across the warehouse and back.
• Also, for the under-40-inches set, a bounce house.
   

WHO’S THERE

Up to 700 people, with enough trampolines to accommodate 126 jumpers at any one time. Little kids, big kids and adults. Birthday party attendees. School groups. Non-jumping parents seated on sofas or at picnic tables, delighted to see their kids having so much fun without a video game in sight. Teenagers with whistles, aka the court monitors, who enforce the rules, which include prohibitions on backflips and double flips.

Tentative jumpers, whose moves include pausing at the edge of the foam pit, then falling in as gently as possible. Fearless jumpers, who do all sorts of crazy maneuvers, including —when the court monitors aren’t looking—backflips and double flips.

On Tuesday mornings, preschoolers whose parents bring them for 90 minutes of guided stretching and bouncing. On Tuesday afternoons, homeschoolers who come to bounce with other homeschoolers. On
Tuesday through Friday evenings, bouncing aerobics classes.

Sometimes, people who disregard the rule about emptying their pockets before jumping, then lose their cellphones in the foam pit and have to wait for the monthly cleaning of the pit to get them back. On the afternoon Field Notes visits, four cooks from a nearby restaurant, taking a work break. They play dodgeball, diving into the foam pit and attempting basketball dunks—windmills, under-the-leg shots, elbow hangs—they could otherwise
only dream of.
 

DRESS CODE

Athletic attire with non-skid hospital socks. Jumpers who fail to bring their own socks, i.e., most jumpers, can buy a pair at the front desk for $3.
 

FREQUENTLY HEARD COMPLAINT

The cost to jump is $18, kamaaina rate, for the first hour. Staff often hear this: “What? I only get an hour? That’s not enough time!” Twenty minutes later, the complainer, winded and ready to collapse, says, “OK, now I get it.”
 

FIVE REASONS COURT MONITORS BLOW THEIR WHISTLES

Backflips, double flips, diving headfirst into the foam block pit, roughhousing, failing to respect the authority of the court monitors.

iTrampoline is located at 91-029 Malakole St., Kapolei; 830-4080; itrampolinehawaii.com.

Did you know? The Consumer Product Safety Commission, no fan of the trampoline, estimates that U.S. emergency rooms treated 94,900 trampoline-related injuries in 2012.