Connecticut athlete dives into unconventional career

You know the saying, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?"

There’s an athlete from Connecticut who took that statement literally, only then he took it a step further: turning cliff jumping into a job, a lifestyle and a spectacle that has people well beyond Connecticut talking.

“Jonah literally cartwheeled before he could walk,” Amy Genser, of West Hartford, said. “[He] flipped before he could run.”

She’s talking about her now 19-year-old son, Jonah Genser.

“Just doing flips and acrobatics and stuff has been a passion of mine since I was born,” Jonah Genser said.

With a sigh, his mom adds, “We would just be like, 'it’s just Jonah.'"

Being “just Jonah” has been just fine by him. The living room became a gym. The gym became a trampoline and a trampoline became a death-defying, high-flying feat of cliff jumping.

Aside from the obvious requirements: a cliff, water and nerves of steel, there’s three main disciplines of the sport.

“Freestyle, which is what I’m more focused on, there’s no rules, there’s no official scoring,” Jonah Genser said. “Whatever they can do to make themselves the most stylish.”

The next is traditional cliff diving, which focuses on form and designated tricks with uniform scoring. And the third is something called Death Diving.

“It is a sport where it’s almost as if you’re going to belly flop and at the last moment, you close in and land on your fists and your feet together,” Jonah Genser explains with a laugh.

Now would probably be a good time to check in with mom, Amy.

“I know people think we're nuts,” Amy Genser said. “You know, at the end of the day, we believe in his abilities.”

And she believes in his training.

“This sport, I'm putting my life on the line just about every time,” Jonah Genser said. “But it's something that I have been training for my whole entire life through gymnastics, trampoline.”

Over the past year as Jonah Genser has entered and won competition after competition and as his videos on social media gained like after like, there was one more big leap he wanted to take.

“It's a very scary thing,” Jonah Genser said. “And I am also very terrified.”

No, not a cliff, not a trick. Instead, he’s talking about the decision after his freshman year of college to put classes on pause and full send into building his career.

“He's actually getting the best education of anybody I know,” Amy Genser said. “I mean, he's traveling the world. He's meeting people from all over the place. He's building a community…He's negotiating these sponsorship deals. How do you learn that in a business class?”

It’s also an exercise in taking advantage of the right timing.

“Who wouldn't want to do what they love most for a living?” Jonah Genser said. “And while I’m in my physical prime and doing it at the highest level I will in my life, it's the perfect time to just go at it 100%.”

For Jonah Genser, that seems to be the only way he knows how.

“The second I say, ‘give me a 5,’ I've already made up my mind that I'm going,” Jonah Genser said. “It's just an incredible feeling once you take off because the second you're off that cliff, all the fear goes away…It's just a mental game, me versus my own mind and I like to see how far I can take it.”

Where will he take it next? Jonah Genser said he hopes to see the sport grow and would love to see it as an Olympic sport.