October, 2024 Rochester Parkour Newsletter

Greetings movement community!

As we embrace the beauty of Fall here in upstate New York, we have some exciting updates to share with you this month!

Before diving in, I want to take a moment to express my deep gratitude. It’s amazing how our shared love of movement has brought together such an incredible community. While we may come from different walks of life, our common passion has built connections that go beyond the gym—lasting friendships that I truly cherish.

This sense of connection was on my mind last night during Movement Circuits. I was struck by a moment that felt both touching and surreal: my toddler was playing under the watchful eye of Audrey, a longtime member of our community. Over 12 years ago, Audrey took a leap of faith and trusted us with teaching, playing with, and caring for her own children. Now, here we are—full circle—sharing the same space and trust with the next generation. It’s these kinds of moments that remind me just how special this community is.

In this newsletter, I’ve got a big announcement regarding our name/brand, a really amazing insurance opportunity that will be a huge asset to you all, a jump start to our YouTube channel, and some community questions regarding class times and schedules.

We’ve noticed some shifts happening in trends recently and our goal is to always provide a schedule that is accommodating and available for our community to access services when it works best for them.

With that in mind, and taking into account new shifts in class attendances, we created a small survey that will help us make better decisions on a schedule that you can benefit from.

Please use the link below to complete that poll. Every student that does will be entered into a giveaway that we’ll draw at random. 3 total winners can choose between a free 1:1 with me, a parkour pullover, or a pair of feiyues.

Thanks everyone!

(Yes, that’s me in the photo. Can’t you tell with all that hair?! I was 19)

For those you who don’t know, the name Rochester Parkour has existed since a fateful day in the Spring of 2007 when my buddy Zac and I were denied our bid to be an official RIT recognized club.

We were obviously frustrated at the denial (although RIT totally made the right call to deny us at the time) and Zac, completely infuriated, went home that night and bought www.rochesterparkour.com and said, “screw them! We’ll do our own thing!”. Fun fact, I still log in to his dreamhost account whenever I need to mess with the DNS settings of the website.

Thus, Rochester Parkour became a thing.

Back then, SEO was much more rudimentary and not as sophisticated as it is now. Choosing to call ourselves something so easily searchable was immensely beneficial and no doubt contributed to our early success. To be clear, we weren’t a business. We were just a group of kids that would invite anyone and everyone to come out to train Parkour at various parks throughout Rochester.

When Nicole and I chose to start the gym, we kept the name because the gym was supposed to be an extension of the community that we had grown from 2007 to 2011. The gorilla logo (yes, it’s a gorilla) was something that I searched all of 20 seconds for and spent 5 min in photoshop outlining. There was no real thought to it.

Today, while we’re not necessarily feeling trapped by our name, we’re also not really feeling like the name is very indicative of who we are, nor is it representative of the business we’ve become. Parkour itself has also changed and we’re honestly just a little tired after spending 14 years giving the same speech over and over and over again to new students, especially new parents, who want their kids to be active, but are worried about whether or not we’re going to teach their kids to jump off buildings.

So this is just an announcement to you all already in our community that we are undergoing a rebrand which will phase itself in over the course of the next several months. We’ll release more details on this soon. For the time being, we just want you to know about it. Anyone who is lucky enough to have RocPK merch, you’re about to have a vintage collector’s item 🙂

Several years ago, when FIG (the global governing body for international gymnastics) attempted to steal parkour and claim it as their own, the global parkour community rallied together to try and create an institutionalized framework to combat against the hostile take over. The United States Parkour Association was born.

Since then, while FIG is still attempting the takeover, USPK has grown to try and become more of a presence and has made some really cool changes and moves to help the US parkour community, the most cool one that I’m sharing here is their Parkour accident insurance.

USPK members, of which anyone can be, gain access to special accidental injury insurance plans that quite literally follow you anywhere you go.

For $60/year, you’ll gain immediate access to $10,000 per year of medical bill reimbursement w/ a $1,000 deductible.

For $90/year, you’ll gain immediate access to $25,000 per year of medical bill reimbursement w/ a $0 deductible, anywhere in the world!

If you are out training parkour in a park, at ours or another’s gym, in your house, on the sidewalk, at a competition, whatever, you can make a claim using this insurance to get your medical bills reimbursed.

RocPK is a member gym of USPK and I (Charles Moreland) am a contributor on a special committee within USPK. The gym will receive a portion of the member fees as commission, which we pledge to use for build projects and other maintenance costs within the gym.

Regardless, this is a really amazing program that USPK has created and can greatly help ease peace of mind for some of you for as little as $5/mo or $7.50/mo.

When you go to enroll, you’ll see a question asking you what community you belong to. You can write in Rochester Parkour or RocPK and that will help USPK know that we referred you.

We’ll be making a shift soon to start putting more videos out online through our YouTube channel. The channel has existed essentially since the gym was created and contains a lot of really awkward and amazing nuggets from the past. If you were interested in a trip down memory lane to see how far we’ve come, or want to know how grungey the gym used to be way back in the dark times of 2012, then give the channel history a look through 🙂

Our first video will be covering the image problem of parkour – you know the one, where you tell your family that your kid is learning parkour, and they give you *that look* because they think you’re crazy. In that video, I’ll plainly and clearly spell out why the problem exists and what we can do to help solve it.

That video will be out soon! We’d appreciate if you subscribed and participate in that new medium as we build out this new presence 🙂