Full Opinion

J-A19020-26 2026 PA Super 245 MICHAEL RISTAINO : IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF : PENNSYLVANIA Appellant : : : v. : : : URBAN AIR DOWNINGTOWN, : No. 2398 EDA 2025 TARASCHI ADVENTURES, LLC, UATP : MANAGEMENT, LLC, URBAN AIR, AND : UA HOLDINGS, LLC : Appeal from the Order Entered August 14, 2025 In the Court of Common Pleas of Chester County Civil Division at No(s): 2023-00177-TT BEFORE: OLSON, J., DUBOW, J., and FORD ELLIOTT, P.J.E. * OPINION BY DUBOW, J.: FILED OCTOBER 30, 2026 Appellant, Michael Ristaino, appeals from the August 14, 2025 order entered in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas granting the motion for summary judgment on the basis of the “no-duty” rule filed by Appellees, Urban Air Downingtown, Taraschi Adventures, LLC, UATP Management, LLC, Urban Air, and UA Holdings, LLC, and dismissing Appellant’s complaint. After careful review, we find that the “no-duty” rule does not apply to the facts of this case. We, therefore, reverse the trial court’s order, reinstate Appellant’s complaint, and remand for further proceedings. The relevant facts and procedural history are as follows. On March 10, 2022, 42-year-old Appellant was a patron of the Urban Air trampoline park in ____________________________________________ * Retired Senior Judge assigned to the Superior Court. J-A19020-26 Downingtown. While using a foam pit attraction, which consists of a long trampoline leading into a loose foam cube pit, Appellant suffered injuries including a wedge compression of the first lumbar vertebrae. On February 24, 2023, Appellant filed an amended complaint alleging claims of negligence against Appellees jointly and severally. 1 Appellees filed preliminary objections, which the trial court overruled on April 13, 2023. On June 7, 2023, Appellees filed an answer and new matter, to which Appellant responded on July 20, 2023. The parties proceeded through discovery, which included the deposition of Appellant; Grace Squillante, who is currently the General Manager of Urban Air location in Downingtown and Urban Air’s corporate representative; and Joshua Mariano Westwood and Alyssa March, two former Urban Air team members. Appellant also produced expert reports. In their reports, Appellant’s experts opined, inter alia, that Appellees’ deficient policies, procedures, and training were contributing factors and a direct cause of Appellant’s injuries. In particular, the experts noted that Appellees had failed to replace the trampoline bed, which was six years and three months old when Appellant had been using it on the day of the incident. The manufacturer had recommended that the trampoline bed be replaced every six to eighteen months and Appellees’ own policy mandated that it be replaced every five years. The ____________________________________________ 1 Appellant initiated this action by filing a complaint on January 9, 2023. -2- J-A19020-26 experts also noted there was a depression on the trampoline bed at issue, which was caused, in part, by the “wear from many years of use without replacement.” Expert Report, 2/3/25, at 11. They opined that, in their professional opinion, the worn-out condition contributed to the instability of the trampoline bed which caused Appellant to lose his balance and sustain his injuries: the bed had turned soft & spongy due to excessive wear and its use beyond the manufacturer’s recommended shelf life. This contributed to the bed being unstable and [Appellant] not being able to control his bounce. It is our professional opinion that [Appellant] would not have experienced rubber legging leading to his injury had the bed been replaced as per the manufacturer’s instruction. Id. In addition to highlighting the failure of Appellees to replace the trampoline bed as required by the manufacturer and Appellees’ own policy, the reports also detailed numerous other ways in which Appellees’ policies, procedures, manuals, training of its employees, and information were inadequate and contributed to Appellant’s accident. On April 3, 2025, Appellees filed a motion for summary judgment asserting that the “no-duty” rule applied to bar Appellant’s negligence claims as a matter of law.2 In response to the motion for summary judgment, Appellant argued that the “no-duty” rule did not apply to bar his claims because his injuries did not result solely from his jumping on the trampoline, ____________________________________________ 2 Briefly, the “no-duty” rule provides that “an owner or operator of a place of amusement has no duty to protect the user from any hazards inherent in the activity.” Chepkevich v. Hidden Valley Resort, L.P., 2 A.3d 1174, 1186 (Pa. 2010). -3- J-A19020-26 but also from “the dangerous nature of the premises that resulted from improper supervision, training, policies, procedures, manuals, as well as due to defective trampoline mats which were not properly maintained and replaced, all as discussed by [Appellant’s] experts in their report[.]” Answer, 5/5/25, at ¶¶ 36-37. On July 22, 2025, the trial court held a hearing on Appellees’ motion for summary judgment, after which it entered summary judgment in favor of Appellees and dismissed Appellant’s complaint. This timely appeal followed. Both Appellant and the trial court complied with Pa.R.A.P. 1925. Appellant raises the following issue on appeal: Did the trial court abuse its discretion or err as a matter of law by granting [Appellees’] motion for summary judgment and determining that:  [Appellant] assumed the risk of injury;  Injury was an inherent risk in the activity of trampolining;  The “no-duty rule” applied to trampolines at a facility where [Appellant] paid admission in exchange for using the trampoline;  The “no-duty rule” applied to a trampoline at the facility despite [Appellees’] failure to use reasonable care in the maintenance and management of the trampoline;  The “no-duty rule” applied to a trampoline at the facility despite the trampoline exhibiting years of wear and tear and not being replaced according to either the manufacturer’s or [Appellees’] replacement schedule;  The “no-duty rule” applied to a trampoline at the facility despite [Appellees’] failure to follow various safety standards, manufacturers’ instructions and ASTM guidelines; and -4- J-A19020-26  The “no-duty rule” applied to [Appellees’] potential reckless or gross negligent conduct? Appellant’s Br. at 4. Appellant challenges the court’s order granting summary judgment in favor of Appellees. Whether the trial court properly granted summary judgment “is a question of law, and thus our standard of review is de novo[,] and the scope of review is plenary.” Chepkevich v. Hidden Valley Resort, L.P., 2 A.3d 1174, 1182 (Pa. 2010). “Summary judgment may be entered only in those cases where the record demonstrates that there remain no genuine issues of material fact, and that the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” Id. When reviewing an order granting summary judgment, “[w]e view the record in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party[.]” Harris v. Hutchinson Sportsmen’s Club, 352 A.3d 1063, 1070 (Pa. Super. 2026) (citation omitted). Here, we confine our inquiry to whether, as the trial court found, Appellant’s negligence action is barred as a matter of law. To prove a negligence claim, a plaintiff must establish “a duty, a breach of that duty, a causal relationship between the breach and the resulting injury, and actual loss.” Hill v. Slippery Rock University, 138 A.3d 673, 677 (Pa. Super. 2016) (citation omitted). “A duty, in negligence cases, may be defined as an obligation, to which the law will give recognition and effect, to conform to a particular standard of conduct toward another.” Atcovitz v. Gulph Mills Tennis Club, Inc., 812 A.2d 1218, 1222 (Pa. 2002) (citation omitted). -5- J-A19020-26 [I]t is a fundamental principle of tort law that there cannot be a valid claim sounding in negligence unless there is a duty upon the defendant in favor of the plaintiff which has been breached. The existence of a duty is a question of law for the court to decide. Straw v. Fair, 187 A.3d 966, 983 (Pa. Super. 2018) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). In Jones v. Three Rivers Management Corporation, 394 A.2d 546 (Pa. 1978), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court set forth the “no-duty” rule. The “no-duty” rule provides that a defendant owes no duty of care to warn, protect, or insure against risks which are “common, frequent and expected.” Id. at 551 (citation omitted); see also Chepkevich, 2 A.3d at 1186. This rule does not affect the duty “to protect patrons from foreseeably dangerous conditions not inherent in [an] amusement activity.” Jones, 394 A.2d at 551. In other words, pursuant to the “no-duty” rule, a defendant, such as an operator of an amusement park, is not liable for injuries that arise from risks of engaging in the activity that are “common, frequent and expected,” but is liable for injuries that arise from risks that a patron would not anticipate. See Jones, 394 A.2d at 550-51 (explaining that the standard of reasonable care applicable to the operator of a baseball stadium imposes a duty to protect from injuries incurred as a result of unanticipated risks). Thus, the inquiry is whether the harm that caused the accident is a risk that a person engaging in the activity would find is “common, frequent and expected.” If so, the “no-duty rule” applies, and the defendant does not owe a duty to the plaintiff. If the harm is caused by a risk that is not foreseeable, common, frequent and expected, the no-duty rule does not apply. -6- J-A19020-26 Applying these principles, the Supreme Court in Jones addressed the applicability of the “no-duty” rule to a situation where the plaintiff, who was properly walking through an interior walkway of Three Rivers Stadium before a baseball game, was hit by a ball batted during batting practice. Jones, 394 A.2d at 547-48. Our Supreme Court held that the “no-duty” rule did not apply because the stadium design included openings built into the wall over right field through which the ball was hit. Id. at 551. The Court found that those openings were not “an inherent feature of the spectator sport of baseball. They are not compelled by or associated with the ordinary manner in which baseball is played or viewed.” Id. This Court further examined this principle in Telega v. Security Bureau, Inc., 719 A.2d 372 (Pa. Super. 1998). In that case, a spectator at a Pittsburgh Steelers game was injured when he was “thrust from his seat and trampled face first into the cement aisle by aggressive fans who stripped him of a souvenir ball.” Id. at 374. The spectator filed a negligence action claiming, among other things, that the defendants were liable for failing to regulate crowd control. Id. In determining that the “no-duty” rule did not apply to bar the spectator’s claim, we held that “being trampled by displaced fans is not a risk inherent in or so ordinary a part of the spectator sport of football such that it is certain to occur at any and every stadium in the Commonwealth.” Id. at 376. The Court dismissed the assertion that it was the spectator’s “responsibility to ensure his own safety and protect himself from the behavior of aggressive fans[.]” Id. -7- J-A19020-26 In the instant case, Appellant contends that the trial court erred in determining that the “no-duty” rule applies because, although he was engaged in the amusement activity of trampolining when he was injured, his injury arose from Appellees’ failure to, among other things, maintain the trampoline bed and not from a risk inherent to the activity of trampolining. Appellant’s Br. at 26-37. He further asserts, relying on Jones, that he introduced adequate evidence through his own testimony and the reports of his experts that Appellees deviated from not only their own policies and procedures with regard to facility maintenance, but also from those the industry requires. Id. at 32-37. Here, the trial court applied the “no-duty” rule because Appellant “conceded that trampoline usage involves inherent risks of physical injuries that can be serious or fatal.” Trial Ct. Op., 10/29/23, at 3. The trial court did not, however, differentiate between or analyze whether the risk posed to Appellant arose simply from his use of the trampoline or from a risk not inherent to the activity of trampolining, i.e., the worn-out condition of the trampoline. Following our review, we agree with Appellant that the trial court erred in applying the “no-duty” rule to bar Appellant’s negligence claims against Appellees. Like in Jones and Telega, we find that Appellant proffered evidence, when viewed in the light most favorable to him as the non-moving party, that it was the worn-out nature of the trampoline and other maintenance deficiencies that caused his injuries. As a matter of law, jumping -8- J-A19020-26 on a worn-out trampoline is a risk that is not “common, frequent, and expected” at a trampoline park. Rather, it is an unforeseeable and unanticipated risk. Therefore, we conclude the trial court erred in determining that the “no-duty” rule barred Appellant’s claims and granting summary judgment in favor of Appellees. Order reversed. Case remanded. Jurisdiction relinquished if and when remand becomes appropriate by operation of law. President Judge Emeritus Ford Elliott joins the opinion. Judge Olson concurs in result. Date: 10/30/2026 -9-