Rope Skipping Canada (RSC) is a national sport organization with four provincial groups under its jurisdiction. And sitting at the head of this organization you’ll find Cameron Short, a 27-year-old from Porters Lake, Nova Scotia.
Cameron started rope skipping when she was nine years old, and when asked if she ever thought she would become the chair of RSC when she first started out, she said definitely not.
“Even when I was first on the RSC board, the thought of being the chair was terrifying,” says Cameron. “But I always wanted to continue to see how we can make it better. There’s always something that could have run better. Wanting to see that through, and with our volunteer base being quite small, I’ve always been the kind of person to step up. If nobody else is going to, I will.”
RSC oversees national championships, nation-wide programming and Canadian athletes competing on the international stage.
But her contribution to the sport doesn’t stop there — she is also a Rope Skipping Association of Nova Scotia (RSANS) board member, coach and athlete.
When it comes to juggling it all Cameron jokes that she is accessible 24/7, so there’s no time zones and little sleep, but really it is about shifting with priority. Plus, she is always working with her team of other board members, administrators and coaches.
This year her efforts were recognized by RSANS when she was named their volunteer of the year at Sport Nova Scotia’s 2026 Support4Sport Awards. This award captured Cameron volunteering to be Manager of Team Canada at the 2025 World Jump Rope Championships in Kawasaki, Japan. This entailed keeping a little over 100 athletes, plus coaches and judges, prepared and on schedule for the event.
“I had also been the Team Canada co-manager at the world championships the year before in Colorado, so I got some experience there,” she says. “When it came time for Japan, I was like, you know what, I’ll put my name forward again.”
When she isn’t taking on a more administrative role, you will often find Cameron sitting in the coach’s box.
“Even when I first started coaching, it was just so much more enjoyable to watch them [her athletes] get a skill than I ever felt getting a skill myself, like seeing how excited they got, being able to give them that tweak that like makes them get it. And then they’re so excited to have that skill and keep learning. Seeing the fire in them was really what kept me and still keeps me doing it.”
When it came to getting into coaching, her club, Jump Energy, had a natural progression in place. Senior athletes would take on a few recreational jumpers and provide some one-on-one guidance. Then, when Cameron’s coach, Dwight Lucas, retired, she and a couple of other senior jumpers and junior coaches took on more responsibility.
“He was my coach from the time I started until he retired. His leadership played a major role in my ability to take on larger coaching roles, and he was a huge part of where a lot of my confidence in life was fostered.”
Yet with all the titles she holds within rope skipping, she also shows up to the gym with the title of mom. Alongside her partner Sam Ashley, who is the current head coach of Jump Energy, they’ve overcome the challenge of both coaching at the same gym while raising a young child thanks to the support of the club and their families.
“For roughly the first year of our son’s life, he was at almost every practice. For the first few months, he would sleep through nearly every practice while I wore him,” she says.
Introducing her son to the world of jump rope early feels like a full-circle moment as it was Cameron’s own mom who ensured she took part in an after-school rope skipping program.
Being on the shyer side, Cameron didn’t have a strong inclination toward larger team sports, but skip rope allowed her to balance individual success while also developing a sense of camaraderie with a smaller scale team.
“When I first started, the rules were that overall teams were usually four people. Working with these four people on all of your different events you got really close,” she explains. “With a big team, it’s easy to be that person that falls into the background, but with a group of four people, it’s much harder.”
Cameron also quickly fell in love with all the travel opportunities the sport provided, going to nationals within her first year and her first world championships a few years later at just 13 years old.
“When I went to my first national championships I was in this room with people who all have this great love for this unique thing,” she says. “Like you have that really tight draw to all these people and that community definitely keeps you going.”
On top of their shared passion, one reason the rope skipping community is so close is its relatively small size. But Cameron and her colleagues are making a continued effort to grow the sport both provincially and nationally. Well exampled by the time they held their national championships in Saskatchewan and sent a group of athletes ahead of time to do some school demonstrations and outreach.
For those who might not have a rope skipping club near them RSC offers CANSkip, a skill progression-based learning system which can be done independently and virtually.
For more information on rope skipping in Nova Scotia, readers can check out RSANS’s website here.
