Connecticut is seeing a surge of trampoline park accidents. The lawsuits have been stacking up in Superior Courts across the state for years, and the pace hasn’t slowed — early 2026 has already brought new filings, including a zipline-fall case involving a child. The complaints, both pending and recently filed, allege serious injuries and lay them at the feet of a handful of operators that keep turning up as repeat defendants.
The injuries run the gamut: fractured spines, broken bones, twisted ankles, head trauma. The alleged culprits are remarkably consistent — unsafe jumping conditions, faulty or poorly maintained equipment, and inadequate supervision. Foam pits come up again and again, including one Massachusetts case against a Connecticut-affiliated operator alleging a child struck a metal object protruding through the foam.
Legally, a trampoline park is a premises-liability case like any other. A property owner open to the public has a duty to keep the premises reasonably safe — to inspect for hazards, fix them or warn about them, and not leave dangerous conditions in place. That duty is the same whether the hazard is a wet floor in a grocery store or an under-filled foam pit at a trampoline park; the difference is that at a trampoline park, people are falling from height and with force, so when something goes wrong the injuries tend to be worse.
Like any business open to the public, these operators carry liability insurance, often with substantial policy limits behind them. But the true scale of these cases is hard to gauge from the outside, because settlements are usually confidential — especially those involving minors. The figures that do surface suggest serious money is at stake: in one Massachusetts matter, a disclosed resolution reached $175,000 for a child left with a facial scar. Most never see daylight at all.
What follows is a closer look at what these complaints actually allege: the injuries that keep recurring, the causes behind them, which operators show up the most, and the question every parent eventually asks — whether the waiver you signed at the door means your family has no recourse.
The injuries are not minor
The phrase “trampoline injury” tends to conjure a twisted ankle. The reality in the court filings is more serious, and it skews heavily toward broken bones and spinal trauma. Plaintiffs in these cases have alleged spinal fractures — including a closed compression fracture of an L1 vertebra after a foam-pit landing, and multiple cervical (neck) fractures after a jumper flipped off a trampoline and came down head-first on concrete. Children have allegedly suffered displaced forearm fractures, supracondylar humerus breaks after falling from a zipline, and tibia and fibula fractures. Others describe concussions and closed head injuries, lumbar hyperextension, ACL tears, and the chronic pain and limited mobility that follow. Several complaints also plead lasting anxiety and emotional distress — the kind of harm that doesn’t show up on an X-ray but reshapes a child’s life all the same.
Many of these injuries are pleaded as permanent. The common thread is simple physics: a body, especially a child’s, decelerates badly when it meets a hard surface — and a trampoline park is full of hard surfaces hiding just beneath the fun.
The most common cause: hard landings where you don’t expect them
Read enough of these complaints and one pattern jumps out. The most frequent cause of serious injury isn’t the bounce itself — it’s coming down onto something hard that should have been soft, or onto someone you never saw coming.
The first scenario is the foam-pit and unpadded-surface problem. Foam pits and the floor areas right next to trampoline platforms are supposed to be the safety net, and plaintiffs repeatedly allege they weren’t. Complaints describe insufficient foam letting a jumper strike the hard bottom of a pit, a metal object or pipe hidden beneath the foam, and unpadded sections of flooring directly beside the trampoline where a jumper gets propelled. This particular failure shows up case after case, across more than one location and even across state lines — which, as we’ll see, is exactly the kind of repetition that carries legal weight.
The second scenario is the multi-patron collision. Some of the most serious child-injury claims involve a bigger or older patron jumping onto or near a smaller child, sending the child flipping or into an awkward landing. The complaints allege the parks failed to limit how many people used a trampoline at once, failed to separate jumpers by age and size, and failed to put enough monitors on the floor to enforce basic one-jumper-per-trampoline rules.
The rest of the cases round out the picture: a torn trampoline bed that snagged a jumper’s foot, separated zipline landing pads, a slip at the bottom of a slide on loose ball-pit balls, and — a reminder that not every injury involves jumping — a slip-and-fall on a wet floor near the dining area, and even a grandmother hurt after mistaking a trampoline surface for a walkway. In nearly every case, the negligence theory tracks the facts word for word: failure to inspect, to maintain, to pad, to warn, to supervise, and to train staff.
Which operators keep showing up
By a wide margin, the Connecticut filings cluster around one operator family — the “Funz / Fun Z” trampoline parks. Treated as a single operator across its locations, this group accounts for the large majority of the trampoline-injury suits in the dataset, with two Connecticut sites generating the bulk of the claims: a Hamden location on Dixwell Avenue and a Waterbury location on Wolcott Street. A handful of related or similarly named entities appear at other addresses, including New Britain and Middletown, plus a separately organized Massachusetts company in Seekonk whose foam-pit allegations look strikingly familiar.
Two structural details deserve a parent’s attention. The first is the sheer proliferation of similar entity names — slight variations on the same brand, registered as different LLCs for different locations. That can make it genuinely hard to know which company you’re dealing with, and harder still for an injured family to identify the right defendant. The second is that several complaints name more than one defendant for a single incident: the operating company, a separate property owner or management firm, and in at least one case an individual manager. That’s a sign plaintiffs’ lawyers are looking past the storefront LLC to whoever actually owns and controls the premises.
There’s also a recurring notice theme worth understanding. More than one complaint alleges the operator knew, or should have known, of prior similar incidents and failed to fix the hazard. When the same type of injury — a foam-pit landing, say — keeps happening at the same chain over several years, an injured family can argue the operator was on notice the condition was dangerous and did nothing about it. The repetition itself becomes evidence.
Does the waiver you signed actually protect them?
Here’s the part most parents get wrong. You signed a tablet releasing the park from “any and all liability,” and you assumed that was the end of any legal recourse if your child got hurt. In Connecticut, that assumption is often mistaken.
Connecticut is one of the least waiver-friendly states in the country for recreational businesses. The key decision is Hanks v. Powder Ridge Restaurant Corp., a 2005 Connecticut Supreme Court case. A patron there was injured snowtubing at a facility open to the general public, having signed a waiver that expressly released the operator from its own negligence. The Supreme Court still refused to enforce it, holding that the waiver violated public policy.
Applying that public-policy test, the court found several factors made the Powder Ridge waiver offensive to public policy: the operator invited the general public regardless of skill; patrons were under the operator’s care and control through a paid transaction; the operator — not the patron — had the knowledge and ability to keep the runs safe and to guard against employee negligence; the operator was better positioned to insure against the risk and spread the cost; enforcing the waiver would strip away the operator’s incentive to maintain safety, leaving the public to bear the cost of injuries; the contract was a standardized adhesion agreement offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, with no option to pay a reasonable fee for protection against negligence; and the operator held superior bargaining power throughout. A year later, in Reardon v. Windswept Farms, the court applied the same reasoning to horseback riding.
Map those factors onto a trampoline park and they line up almost perfectly. The park is open to anyone regardless of experience; your kids are in the operator’s care for a paid session; the operator — not you — controls whether the foam pit is filled, the padding is in place, and the floor is staffed; and the release is handed to you at the kiosk with no chance to negotiate. There are a few related principles worth knowing on top of that. Connecticut, unlike many states, won’t read a release as covering negligence at all unless it actually uses the word “negligence” in language an ordinary person would understand, so vague boilerplate routinely fails. And a parent generally cannot sign away a child’s claims — courts in Connecticut and elsewhere have been skeptical of pre-injury waivers in which a parent purports to release a minor’s future negligence claims against a for-profit business.
The “inherent risk” line that survives the ruling
None of this means operators are liable for everything, and it’s important to be honest about where the line falls. The Powder Ridge court was careful to preserve the doctrine of assumption of inherent risk. In a key footnote, it clarified that its holding does not extend to the risks inherent in the activity itself — those dangers that are “innate to the activity, are beyond the control of the [recreational] area operator and cannot be minimized by the operator’s exercise of reasonable care.”
So a patron still assumes the dangers built into the sport: the ordinary jolt of a bounce, the variations in how a body lands, the collisions that are simply part of jumping. What an operator cannot do is contract away liability for its own negligence in how it runs and maintains the facility — an under-filled foam pit, a metal object left where children land, an unpadded floor beside the trampoline, a court so crowded that a collision was waiting to happen. The dividing question in almost every one of these cases is the same: was this an inherent risk of the activity, or was it the operator’s own failure to keep the place reasonably safe? The complaints reviewed here overwhelmingly allege the latter.
The practical upshot is that signing the waiver does not automatically end your case in Connecticut, especially where the injured person is a child, the harm flowed from the operator’s own negligence in maintaining or supervising the facility, and the release language is anything less than crystal clear. It’s a hurdle, not a wall.
What this means for your family
None of this is a reason to never let your kids jump. It’s a reason to go in clear-eyed. The serious injuries are real, and they tend to be fractures and spinal trauma rather than sprains. The most dangerous moments are the hard landings — into under-filled foam pits, onto unpadded floors beside the trampolines, or in collisions with bigger jumpers — so keep smaller children away from crowded courts and mixed-age free-jump sessions. And if your child does get hurt, remember that the waiver is not the last word. Preserve everything you can: incident reports, photos of the foam pit or padding, the names of staff and witnesses, and all medical records.
If your child has been injured at a trampoline park, the most important step is to speak with a licensed Connecticut personal injury attorney promptly — waiver and notice questions are fact-specific, and the deadline to file suit doesn’t wait forever..
See a chart of all the trampoline park cases in CT
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