Skydiving Sarasota Doctor Training For World Record Attempt

SARASOTA, FL — Dr. Jennifer Bocker discovered her passion for skydiving in 2006 during her fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

With her cousin getting married, Bocker, her sister and her cousin wanted to do something memorable when they visited her in New York and decided to give skydiving a try. She fell in love with the extreme sport immediately.

“I found it was one of the few places in the world I could go and only focus on one thing, skydiving,” she told Patch. “I couldn’t think about patients. I couldn’t think about stress. I couldn’t think about the hospital. It was my release.”

And when she learned that she could compete in the sport, nationally and internationally, she was hooked.

Now, the new chief medical officer at HCA Florida Sarasota Doctors Hospital is training to earn her second world record. Bocker already holds one skydiving world record in the large formation sit position.

“There’s no feeling like it when you get a record,” she said.

Working with Project 19, she’ll be part of a group of 101 women making a large formation jump in the head-down position in honor of the 101st anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

The 101 women, hailing from all over the world, will gather in Arizona for five days this November in an attempt to set the record. While the large formation jump was initially planned for the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment two years ago, the record attempt was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.

While there are also competitions in smaller groups, usually sets of two or four skydivers, Bocker prefers working with large formations when jumping.

“It’s a large team working together,” she said. “Everybody has to work together, and everybody has to have their best jumps to get it. It’s seconds of working time to get the picture.”

She moved to the Sarasota area from Colorado in December to work with HCA Florida.

A board-certified general surgeon with specialty training in Level 1 trauma surgery and head and neck surgical oncology, Bocker is originally from the Chicago suburbs. She received her medical degree from Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago, performed her general surgery residency at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center in New York, and did her fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Before joining Sarasota Doctors Hospital, she worked with a county hospital system in the Bronx and, most recently, at a private practice in Colorado. She worked her way up to the private practice’s executive board, eventually becoming head of finance.

“That’s what drove me to get my MBA. I didn’t know the language and wanted to know more,” said Bocker. “I was going home and spending hours researching how to run this business.”

Once she entered an MBA program, she found it was a great fit for her interests.

“I really enjoyed the business side of medicine and saw the potential bigger changes if I moved on from private practice,” she said.

Bocker was already visiting Florida each year to train for skydiving, as Sebastian on the state’s East Coast is a center for the sport.

“It’s kismet,” she said. “I came for the job, but it also happens to be beneficial that there’s a big skydiving mecca here.”