Texas trampoline parks aren’t regulated or inspected. We found 494 injuries in DFW region
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Cole House’s ankle popped as he landed on a hard spot between two trampolines.
His body, thrown into shock, didn’t initially register the pain. So he looked down.
“I could see the bottom of my heel just sitting there,” he said, describing his disfigured ankle.
House, a 19-year-old junior college baseball player, was celebrating a friend’s birthday at Fort Worth’s Flight Deck Trampoline Park when he suffered the injury that would end any dream of a sports career. Now 25, his ankle still bothers him six years later.
His case is just one of a surprising number of injuries — from minor sprains and bone fractures to more serious, sometimes debilitating trauma — at indoor trampoline parks across North Texas. As the family-friendly amusement businesses have grown in popularity in recent years, so too have the number of children and adults suffering sometimes gruesome damage to their feet, backs and heads.
Yet no one in Texas tracks injuries, safety protocols or any potential dangers at these businesses, which usually feature side-by-side trampolines packed on any given weekend with children and young adults flipping and hurling through the air.
An investigation by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram found nearly 500 reports of injuries at 21 trampoline parks in Dallas-Fort Worth since 2015. These injuries were serious enough to call for emergency medical treatment; the true number of injured children or adults, including cases where someone was driven to a doctor or hospital, is likely higher.
Unlike 11 other states with regulations on the books, Texas has no laws requiring parks to follow basic safety precautions or undergo inspections, or even carry insurance. The trampoline park industry sets out its own safety guidelines through its trade association. But nothing in Texas requires any of the parks here to follow those guidelines or report injuries or deaths.
“It baffles my mind,” said Kolter Jennings, a Fort Worth injury attorney who has represented families in lawsuits against trampoline parks, including one where a young girl was left with a spinal cord injury. “If you forced them to have insurance, if they had better staff, then maybe they could be safe.”
The consequences can be fatal.
In 2012, a 30-year-old man in Arizona named Ty Thomasson did a back flip into a foam pit at a trampoline park. Foam pits should be at least 6 feet deep, according to the industry’s own guidelines, but this pit was 29 inches deep.
“He came up a bit short and broke his neck and spine,” said Doug Coleman, a former Arizona lawmaker. “Three days later, the family took him off of life-support and he died.”
Thomasson’s mother contacted Coleman, a Republican, with a plea: Introduce legislation that would require Arizona parks to follow industry standards and to be inspected. If the pit Thomasson had jumped into was deep enough, he probably would have survived, Coleman said.
Some Arizona lawmakers were reluctant to put more regulation on businesses, Coleman said, until they heard Thomasson’s story. The industry’s trade group, the International Association of Trampoline Parks, helped draft the legislation, which then-Gov. Jan Brewer signed in 2014. Arizona now mandates trampoline parks carry a certain amount of insurance, undergo yearly safety inspections and report serious injuries to the state.
Ten other states now have similar regulations.
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“Accidents happen in any industry, but you have that assurance that there is some level of safety and that if you do a back flip into a foam pit, it will be six feet deep,” Coleman said.
The Texas Licensing & Administrative Procedures Committee did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Fractured ankle, severed tendons
In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the rules at trampoline parks can vary. Most require jumpers to stay on their own trampolines.
House said the Fort Worth park where he injured his foot, called Flight Deck along Interstate 30 on the west side of the city, didn’t make it clear that jumping from one trampoline to another wasn’t allowed.
“They didn’t make me sign a waiver or anything when I walked in,” he said. “It was just, go in and start jumping.”
House initially bounced on one trampoline and then saw a young girl jump across a row of trampolines. He decided to do the same.
In one miscalculated jump, House landed on a metal divider. The force of the land fractured his ankle and severed its tendons.
While he waited for medics, an employee of Flight Deck, which permanently closed during the pandemic, said other people had suffered similar injuries from jumping between trampolines, according to a lawsuit House filed against the park in 2017.
At least 15 other lawsuits have been filed against trampoline parks in Tarrant and Dallas counties since 2014, the Star-Telegram found.
Two lawsuits said that visitors weren’t required to sign waivers. Three lawsuits accused parks of failing to inform customers of rules and safety regulations. Two other lawsuits blamed bad maintenance for injuries after trampolines collapsed.
Representatives from Flight Deck trampoline parks could not be reached for this story.
Uncovering injury reports from trampoline parks
Since Texas doesn’t track injuries at trampoline parks, the Star-Telegram used public records of calls to ambulance services to uncover the nearly 500 injuries in recent years. Ambulance calls that appeared to be unrelated to normal activities in the park, such as a shooting or nearby car crash, were excluded.
Some EMS companies provided records with details about the injuries and the victims’ ages. Others released only basic information.
Paramedics who responded to trampoline parks in Dallas-Fort Worth saw injuries including a 3-year-old with a broken ankle, an 8-year-old with chest pains, a 30-year-old with two blown-out knees and an 11-year-old with an injured back, according to the records.
In Fort Worth, a 4-year-old received fractures to the growth plates of his right tibia and fibula while jumping at Flight Deck on April 7, 2017. The boy now sees a specialist every six months.
He was on a trampoline when other jumpers who were larger than him joined, which caused a recoil effect. He was propelled into the air, and his body slammed down on the trampoline, according to a lawsuit.
Experts say injuries occur more often than many people realize. Trampolines inherently pose risks, including those in people’s backyards.
“I don’t have a week go by where I don’t put someone in a cast from a trampoline,” said pediatrician Susannah Briskin, a Ohio doctor and fellow with the American Academy of Pediatrics.
While broken bones and torn ligaments are most common, Briskin said, neurological problems account for 1 in 200 injuries.
“That includes paralyzation, which is most common with failed flips,” she said. “Being turned into a quadriplegic is a risk people take when they do trampoline activity.”
Trampoline park laws in other states
In other states, parks must undergo regular inspections.
Utah Republican Rep. Norm Thurston sponsored the bill after a city council member expressed concerns over the amount of injuries one city had recorded.
“The first thing we did, is that in order to operate you have to have a business license,” Thurston said. “And to get that, the city or county must require a few things. They have to show compliance with national standards, they have to have an annual inspection and insurance.”
The inspection can be done by someone who is licensed, by the industry trade group or by a certified employee.
“One of the things that was critical, I did not want this to be regulated by a government agency,” Thurston said.
The trade group, the International Association of Trampoline Parks, established basic safety guidelines. According to its membership website, only five trampoline parks in Texas are members. Out of 19 parks now open in North Texas, only three are listed: Altitude Fort Worth, House of Air Crowley and Urban Air Adventure Parks in Bedford.
Parks often have customers sign waivers, but those haven’t prevented injured people from suing.
A teenager went to Altitude Trampoline Park in November 2015 to participate in a teen night and broke bones in both of his legs as he and three friends jumped on the same trampoline. His family sued the park for negligence and claimed that while the park was staffed, jumpers weren’t supervised. After the teen got hurt, an ambulance didn’t show up for nearly an hour because employees wouldn’t call 911 until his parents arrived. He was hospitalized for three days and was wheelchair bound for about three months.
Within a year of filing the lawsuit, it had been settled.
In response to an interview request with Altitude, a spokesperson provided a statement to the Star-Telegram: “At Altitude Trampoline Park, we take safety very seriously. Rules and regulations are posted throughout the parks. We also feature a continuous video on safety protocols and precautions. Our active play environment is constantly monitored to ensure guest safety at all parks.”
The fact that Texas doesn’t have insurance requirements for trampoline parks can factor into what comes out of successful lawsuits.
“When parks don’t have insurance, there’s nothing to go after in a lawsuit,” Jennings, the attorney, said. “Amusement park rides are required to have insurance, but the Texas legislature has said that trampolines are not amusement park rides. So you have all these facilities and catastrophes that can happen and no insurance, so there’s nothing to fund the lawsuit.”
‘It’s a life lesson’
House, the man whose ankle ligaments were torn, was able to settle his lawsuit.
He was a catcher for his junior college’s baseball team when he was injured. He had aspirations to continue playing in college and was curious to see where his baseball career would land him.
“I spent the year after rehabbing,” he said. “I hoped to play again, and I played a little bit, but baseball wasn’t for me.”
The pain of crouching would be unbearable by the end of games. He could’ve gone to school in Iowa to keep playing, but he chose to attend the University of Texas because his education was more important. He studied economics and graduated in December.
House has a good attitude about everything that happened to him.
“It’s a life lesson,” he said. “As much as I want a normal ankle, sometimes I wake up and wimp around for 30 minutes because my ankle’s tight, but I wouldn’t be where I’m at if all that didn’t happen.”
This story was originally published January 23, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
