Nobody could talk Shonda Huber Haught out of skydiving back in October 1982.

She was a junior at Wichita State when she and a few others started a new WSU-sanctioned skydiving club.

Her mother wouldn’t stop telling her she was going to get hurt jumping with her team in Hutchinson during the weekend of Oct. 24th.

So, she sarcastically cleaned her room before she left for the jump.

“I need to get it ready for when I break my leg,” Haught told her mother.

“I’m not going to visit you in the hospital,” Haught’s mother said.

“I wasn’t scared, because you can’t jump out of a plane at 3,000 feet if you are,” Haught said.

Haught didn’t think anything was going to happen, but she had her friends come with her to jump, in case she needed a ride to the hospital.

She and four other people trained with their jumpmaster six hours before they loaded up in the plane to jump alone.

During the jump, “I made a turn at about 200 feet, the parachute gave out, and I landed on the runway,” Haught said.

Her friends and jumpmaster loaded her and two other injured jumpers in an Oldsmobile on an old mattress and headed for Wichita.

Haught had broken her femur. Her leg was six inches shorter than the other when she arrived at the hospital.

 “We had no business being up in a plane when the military trains for six months to jump out of the plane,” Haught said.

Despite her injuries, Haught only dropped one class and was able to complete everything else thanks to people videotaping classes and teachers giving extra time on assignments.

Her mother also visited her every day.

She was in the hospital for 42 days. For 35 days, she was strapped to the bed in traction to hold her leg together.  To this day, she is fully recovered, but still has a scar where the pins were in her leg.

There was one more jump by the skydiving team, but then WSU made the decision to disband the club, Haught said.

Today, Haught teaches ESOL in the Maize school district, has raised two sons with her husband, Marc, and lives in west Wichita. But she said she will never forget the accident. She made a scrapbook to remember little details about what happened, including the manual WSU gave her and pictures and drawings people sent her in the hospital.

Haught advises college students thinking about skydiving to either train for while or jump with a seasoned skydiver. “Had I not been hurt, I would have done it again,” Haught said. “It was fun until the last part.”