What does it take to be the best skipper in the world?

When Thames-based competitive skipper Sacha Willetts told her whānau she had made it to the world championships – the first New Zealander to do so - there was initially a laugh in disbelief.

In just two years, the 40-year-old went from skipping as a hobby to competing in top ranks, winning medals in Australia, and now qualifying for the world championships in Japan in July.

Willetts, who can do 70 skips in 30 seconds and 355 jumps in 3 minutes, hopes to pull off some of her best tricks on stage, including ones where she lets go of the rope handle, twirls it and catches it again.

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“That’s not even fast though, honestly. The best [skippers] in the world are doing over 100 right-foot jumps,” she says of her personal best speed.

At competitions, they only count the right-foot skip, so overall her personal best of 70 would be 140 in 30 seconds.

She even does handstands and push-ups during her routine, which surprises those who have never seen this sport before.

“When I talk about skipping with people, they think ‘oh that’s nice, you do skipping’, which in their heads I’m just jumping over the rope. But once I show them what I mean when I talk about skipping … people say to me ‘I’ve never seen that before’.”

Juggling training six days a week as well as mobility and strength-training gym sessions with a full-time day job as a content manager, Willets, who funds herself to compete overseas, admits it’s not been easy.

“It's been hard, definitely. In the last probably year, I found it even more challenging as I'm going to worlds and so my training has stepped up, but also the interest from schools and kind of my community and stuff has raised as well.”

She started to self-teach from online tutorials after scrolling through Instagram and falling down an algorithm rabbit hole watching professional skippers in 2021.

“I have always been into fitness [in my] younger years, played [netball and rugby], and then through my 20s and early 30s was very much a gym bunny … so I have always enjoyed that sort of stuff. I guess that's why Instagram showed me something like skipping.”

About a year later, she wanted to try a one-off session with the closest skipping coach she could find - Luke Boone, a 72-time world champion based in Australia.

Their training sessions mostly took place on Zoom, but Boone noticed from the start that she was quick to pick things up and six months later asked her to compete.

“I was very adverse to [competing] at the start, I was 36 years old when I picked up my skipping rope and started to learn stuff," she told Afternoons.

“So, in my head, I was too old. I thought myself incapable of a lot of the stuff that I can do now.”

Willetts will be facing off against jumpers half her age in Japan in freestyle and speed categories.

For freestyle, competitors choreograph a 75-second routine with music, which gets scored on criteria like execution of tricks, the difficulty of skills, appearance while performing the tricks, movement of the rope, and taking breaks.

“If you do two jumps where you're not doing anything other than just normal jumping over the rope, then you get marked down for that because … it’s considered breaking.

“And those are real killer, particularly for someone who's 40 years old.”

It’s difficult for a freestyle routine to be clean of errors, even the best in the world will trip up, she says. So her focus has been to minimise any mistakes and learn to come out of any creatively.

She hopes her representation on the world stage will be a gateway for more New Zealand youngsters to get into the sport.

The stage is even more meaningful as it will be the first time her parents get to watch her compete.