If you blink you could miss it. Senior Liz Butterfield jumps, twists and twirls to the breakneck speed of the beat so fast it’s nearly impossible to follow every move she makes. She’s competed around the world and in front of the U.S. Congress, and she’s Ithaca College’s newest national champion.

But you won’t find Butterfield kicking a soccer ball at Carp Wood Field, she won’t be swimming in the Hill Center, and she doesn’t run track at South Hill’s stadium that happens to bear her last name. Her sport of choice is competitive freestyle jump rope.

Since she was six years old, Butterfield has been a member of Kangaroo Kids, a jump roping organization based out of Howard County, Md.

She most recently traveled to Texas to compete in the 2009 U.S. National Jump Roping Championships. In front of a panel of judges,

Butterfield blazed through her routine taking one part gymnastics floor exercise, one part ballet, mixing in a jump rope, and a minute and a half later she was crowned the Grand National Champion of Women’s Freestyle Single Rope.

Butterfield has developed her routine during many years of competition and even added a move she created on her own. She describes it as a fouetté, a common ballet step, but through a jump rope. Piece by piece, Butterfield says it should look like this:

“You do a turn, and you lift your leg up to your knee. While you turn, your leg rotates around your body as well. So your leg goes out and then in and wraps around your knee. While you’re doing that, you put the rope above your head, and then you put it under your legs.”

Easy enough, right? Butterfield says it’s the hardest move she performs, as well as her favorite.

The popularity explosion of the sport has led Butterfield to perform at NBA games and Congress. She said jumping for United States senators and representatives was an amazing experience in its own right.

“[Congress] chooses a state every year, and there’s a day when they have things from that state,” she said. “That year it was Wisconsin, which is apparently the jump rope state, which I never knew, but there was a lot of cheese.”

As for the future of jump rope, Butterfield is hopeful it will become an Olympic sport. With the advancement of tricks and the sport spreading worldwide, Butterfield said there might be a future for jump rope on the biggest stage of sports.

“I’ll probably be old and decrepit and won’t be able to walk anymore, but I’m pretty sure it will make it to the Olympics,” she said. “There’s just so much stuff you can do with a rope.”

Cory Francer is a senior sport studies major. Contact him at cfrance1@ithaca.edu.