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Fun Facts

How Long?
We have been bouncing since 1886 and are celebrating 122 years of bouncing in 2008!

One, Two, Up She Goes!
Bouncing Girls can reach heights of 20 to 35 feet.

1937
Saint Paul Athletic Club starts the Saint Paul Bouncing Team; Lucille Leopold becomes first ever Bouncing Girl.

1990s
The bouncing tradition is kept alive by a scrappy collection of volunteers after the Saint Paul Athletic Club closes its doors.

The St. Paul Bouncing Team upholds a long tradition of performing the blanket toss. It is believed that the blanket toss predates written history. Native Americans in Alaska, Canada and the Pacific Northwest employed the toss as a means of elevating one of their clan to a higher vantage point—the better to watch for game, predators or other threats. From a little elevation one can see a long way across the tundra. The toss is still conducted as a team event at the Eskimo Olympics in Alaska.

Eventually someone started blanket tossing for sport. Some bounce for height, but all bounce for accuracy.

The St. Paul Bouncing Team is loosely affiliated with the start of the St. Paul Winter Carnival, which began in 1886, prompted by an article by a New York reporter who wrote in a previous year that Saint Paul was "another Siberia, unfit for human habitation" in winter.

Offended by this attack on their fair city, the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce decided to not only prove that the city was not only habitable but that its citizens were very much alive during winter. Thus was born the St. Paul Winter Carnival.

In the beginning, there were many squads of bouncers and flyers that would travel the parade routes and entertain the crowds every January. In the 1930s, the St. Paul Athletic Club began to sponsor its own team, and in 1937, Lucille Leopold became the first St. Paul Athletic Club "Bouncing Girl."

Since Miss Leopold, hundreds of intrepid women have flown with us, wearing the title of Bouncing Girl. When the Athletic Club closed its doors in the early 1990s, the core of that team reinvented itself and became the nonprofit organization it is today, supported by its members through roughly 12 appearances throughout the calendar year.