Steve Kanat – A Family Affair

The Story of Our Very Own (Amazing) Kanat Tribe

Logically, Steve Kanat shouldn’t be in the sky. He should be in a doctor’s office. And he should be looking at feet.

Lucky for us, he evaded that fate.

“I was born in Detroit, and I have lived in the Detroit metro area my whole life,” he explains. “My father came here for a position in podiatry. He went to school in Chicago, came out here, and started what ended up being a podiatry empire.”

As Steve tells it, his father “just started meeting the right people”–to the point where he and a group of peers managed to meet with enough influential senators to get podiatry covered by insurance for the first time in history. The senior Kanat went on to start the first podiatry-only hospital in the country, becoming one of the leading podiatrists in the nation in the process, as well as very well-known person in the podiatry world. He either taught most of the podiatrists that are practicing now, or has taught the people who taught them.

While he tips his hat to those accomplishments, Steve wanted absolutely nothing to do with feet in his professional life.

“He asked a few times if I wanted to get into podiatry,” Steve laughs, “but I had no interest in it at all. That said, I still tried to take as much as I could from his example as far as his interpersonal skills are concerned.”

Sharp interpersonal skills are very useful in Steve’s current position at the dropzone. He’s been the Safety and Training Advisor at Skydive Tecumseh for about five years, acting as the first point of contact for safe skydiving at the dropzone, answering questions and teaching. It’s evident that he does it for love–and, as a matter of fact, it’s love that got him into the sport in the first place.

“In November of 2001, my wife Kim and I were in Hawaii visiting her sister, who was in the Air Force,” Steve remembers. “We did all the hikes, and went to all the waterfalls we could find, and visited all the beaches. I eventually got bored. I looked online, and they had skydiving there. We both said let’s try it.”

Steve and Kim were utterly wowed by their experience.

“We fell in love with it immediately,” Steve smiles, “but we had a young child. She was about two years old at the time, and we were trying to have a second one. We thought we can’t do this. But just a few months after my second child was born, we spent our 10th wedding anniversary in class at Tecumseh to get our license or to start the process.”

It was June of 2003.

“I had a 10th anniversary ring I’d gotten for her,” he says. “I wanted to give it to her after our first training jump, but since I had no idea what I was doing, I was so afraid to lose it. I didn’t understand how it was going to work. I figured it would get sucked out of my pocket. I ended up giving it to her that night at a restaurant.”

Both Kim and Steve are avid sport skydivers to this day, and have both grown in the sport in their own unique way. Steve is a multi-rated skydiving instructor, earning his Coach rating  in ‘06, his IAD Instructor rating in ‘08 and his AFF Instructor rating in ‘09. Kim never had any desire to pursue instructional ratings; instead, she’s a team member on the Misty Blues, the only all-female skydiving demo team in the world.

All that jumping means that both of the Kanat kids–daughters, to be specific–have grown up on the dropzone since they were barely walking. The pair’s oldest daughter, Sloan, made her first skydive last year when she turned 18, on a ten-way jump with two videographers, sharing the sky with people she’s known most of her life.

“We did two jumps that day,” Steve reminisces. “My wife and I did a tandem jump with Sloan. Then we went and did [Sloan’s] first AFF, which was one of the scariest jumps I have been on because I was making an AFF jump with my very own daughter, and she was scared, because everybody is. Even though I knew better than anyone that everything was going to be fine, there’s a primal reaction to that.”

“I thought I was showing my normal instructor confident face,” he laughs, “until somebody showed me a picture they’d taken of me in front of the plane. I’m clearly not confident. And she was scared. But as soon as her face hit the wind, her expression went from total fear to this huge smile–everything relaxed–and she did great. It was a blast.”

This year, Sloan is officially going for her license, and her parents are super-proud of her. They’re especially happy that she’s going to be a sport-skydiving member of the incredible Skydive Tecumseh community that helped raise her–a community they love just like family.

“Skydive Tecumseh has always been our home drop zone,” Steve notes. “I’m very loyal. I’ve always loved the people. The dropzone has been around for so long that Skydive Tecumseh is a very well-known name in skydiving. It has always been a great place to be. And now [dropzone owner Franz Gerschwiler] bought the airport where we’re currently located and has built this incredible hangar with some of the best equipment in the country now. It’s going to be a great season.”