Submitted PhotoTaking leaps and bounds while having fun is what Recoil is all about. While others wait their turn, a girl happily bounces toward the foam pit.

VALDOSTA – Recoil Trampoline Park may have opened up in late 2019, but it’ll be experiencing its first full year outside of the COVID-19 pandemic come this September.

It’s been a long-fought journey and one well worth it as the park’s clientele keeps increasing, Trent Coggins, owner, said. He said it’s getting back to where it should be rather than where they were when the pandemic initially started.

Recoil was built on the foundation that no one could bring a trampoline park to Valdosta because it was “just too small,” Coggins said. At least, that was the answer he received after calling franchise after franchise to come down.

Coggins had just had his own experience with a trampoline park on a whim from his wife. He’d never heard of a trampoline park beforehand.

“My wife wakes me up on a Saturday morning and says ‘Get up. We’re going to take the boys on a day trip,’” Coggins said, referencing his four sons. “We wake up and we drive to a trampoline park. It was pretty neat. I enjoyed it and my kids really enjoyed it.”

A thought sparked into his head saying, “We need something like this in Valdosta.” With the realization that no current franchises would build one here, Coggins decided to build his own.

Recoil was a project three years in the making from the idea to its opening in September 2019. The opening turnout was awesome all the way through Christmas, he said, but of course, Christmas is a natural downtime.

“After Christmas, New Year’s was just amazing and we were throwing gangbusters January, February right up until the week before (the pandemic) hit,” Coggins said.

Recoil shut down for eight weeks, a process that began around March 1, 2020. Birthday parties cover a majority of the park’s revenue, so as more people became fearful of COVID-19, more people canceled their parties. This led to Recoil’s voluntary shutdown a few days before the mandatory one.

However, this wasn’t time the park spent doing nothing. It was time spent performing renovations and improvements. It was still a painful process.

Recoil is home to 35 employees who couldn’t work during that time. They may be mainly high school and college students, but they still depend on the funds they earned at their job.

“Eight weeks felt like an eternity,” Coggins said. “The hard part was talking to some of our vendors and creditors – those types of things – (but) most people really worked well with us.”

Everyone was facing similar situations, so it wasn’t hard finding common ground.

The City of Valdosta, for instance, Recoil’s landlord at the Five Points property, was understanding of the situation the park, so it managed payment in a way that worked for both sides, Coggins said.

Once Recoil was eligible to open back up, it did so albeit with a feeling of uneasiness.

“At the time, we didn’t know the science – we didn’t know that children don’t seem to be carriers, as much,” Coggins said, referring to their worries. “Our target customers are kids.”

Social distancing is difficult when your primary customer is 8-years-old.

Nataliia Yakushko, manager, said the kids would be hard to control given that they can’t wear masks and you couldn’t tell them not to touch each other. You could tell them but there wouldn’t be much abiding by it.

So, they waited. Instead of opening right back up in April 2020, Recoil opened in mid-May to a slow but steady crowd. Week by week came a 5% increase to customer numbers, but it didn’t go back to a momentum similar to the 2019 opening until August, after the start of school.

By October, birthday parties started being scheduled again and weekends had higher turnouts. There was an increased momentum toward Recoil’s climax in January 2021.

“January, February, March were absolutely insane,” Coggins said. “April and spring break were absolutely record-breaking for us. Of course, we’d never seen a spring break before. We were out spring break last year, so we didn’t know what to expect.”

It caught the Recoil team off-guard. They knew there’d be a lot of people out for the break but never knew the entire Lowndes County School System would decide to come to Recoil. It did give them an indication of what they may face in the summer.

“We did OK (last summer),” Yakushko said. “But we didn’t have any school events or outside camps. We had our camp but now we’re getting so many calls from schools asking ‘Can we come here for a day,’ ‘Can we come here for an after-school party?’”

Coggins said the three weeks of summer camp last year were well-attended.

“We were pretty impressed,” he said. “This summer, we’re doing six weeks of camps.”

Two of those are STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) camps. It’s such a big difference from where Recoil was the year prior and one Coggins attributes to customer loyalty.

For some clients, COVID-19 or not, they were going to be at Recoil, Coggins said. That means keeping the clientele entertained and making sure park safety is at an all-time high.

During the process of bringing Recoil to Valdosta, Coggins and his family visited all the trampoline parks in the Southeast. Using his children as guinea pigs for the matter, Coggins asked them what they liked and didn’t like about the parks they visited.

This measured out to areas presented in Recoil – the dodgeball, basketball, trapeze and ninja course areas – but also extended to the seating areas for adults. Clean, safe and fun became the goals – emphasis on clean and safe as the pandemic went on.

“We invested in some electrostatic technology that lets us spray down the entire facility,” Coggins said; they bought even more during the pandemic. “It’s fun to run, so the employees actually love doing it.”

“It creates a magnetic field on top of our foam and everything to keep the place cleaner longer,” Yakushko said.

At least one person every shift is dedicated to cleaning the facility regardless if people were jumping or not. It made people feel safer because they always saw it, Yakushko said. Staying clean was something Coggins’ wife said had to be done should Recoil come to life.

Another thing that keeps bringing Recoil’s clientele back are the employees. Regular customers are always coming back and asking if a specific person is there, Yakushko said.

And if being named as the Best Kids Party Place by Valdosta Daily Times’ readers for Best of South Georgia 2020 and 2021 is any indication, the staff rounds out the park. They do more than just cut cakes.

“As I traveled out in Valdosta, went out to eat and see people in the streets, I was amazed by the number of people that complimented me on our staff and how well they interact with kids,” Coggins said.

Yakushko said customers even call her out there, scaring the employees sometimes, just to compliment them in front of her. Coggins said he wanted the most outgoing of employees when he started Recoil, ones who wouldn’t stand in the corner and ones he could encourage to play.

“One of the things that I tell them is don’t be afraid to get out there and play dodgeball with the kids,” he said. “You see some girls trying to learn how to do a backflip, get out there and participate.”

They can’t always do that, for instance if they’re slammed on a Saturday and help is needed all around, but on slow days throughout the week, they’re free to have fun.

More information: (229) 262-7887, 3103 N. Ashley St. and recoiltrampolinepark.com.