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My heart is beating rapidly. I am filled with trepidation. Can I perform? Will I remember my routines? Will I stick the landing? Will I keep my legs straight? What if I fall off the beam? What if I disappoint my coaches? What if I’m not the best? What if…?
As an eight-year-old little girl walking into this massive gymnasium filled with girls who look the part, coaches strutting around, judges watching your every move. I want to run away.
My friends are all at home watching Hannah Montana and playing with their Barbies and there I stand facing mature competition and testing my physical capabilities.
The four pieces of apparatus that I have spent countless hours training on and conquering suddenly look daunting. I am shaking like a leaf.
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Suddenly the hall, that I love more than home, becomes torture. I no longer can jump from bar to bar, do flips with ease, run up to the vault, jump over and feel like I am flying. From now onwards I become petrified of anything that is associated with gymnastics. The machines become petrifying.
I continue gymnastics for a year after but it becomes miserable for me. I no longer have a passion for spending hours with my team doing flips. I come up with every excuse I can possibly think of to get out of going to gymnastics. During this year I have not yet admitted to myself that I am scared. After a year of tears, fear and exhaustion I approach my mom and explain my feelings to her. I decide to leave with all the amazing memories I have and leave a winner rather than being resentful and hating the thing I love the most.
It is very hard for me to watch what I thought was my life shatter in front of my
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I am forever grateful for the lessons I learnt, the people I met, the experience I gained and I now know what true love is. Gymnastics has made me into the person I am today. When something scares me I know how to conquer my fears, I know how to set goals, to deal with disappointment and I will always keep the leotards and tracksuits as memorabilia of a very special time in my life. I am not a quitter, I have left a
In fourth grade I took gymnastics. I really like it, and had a lot of
When I arrived at my new and enormous high school, I got lost. It was June, and since classes had just ended for the day, large crowds of kids filled up the hallways, and I got bumped around like I did not exist. Thankfully, a cheerleader saw me and figured that I had come there for tryouts since I wore shorts, cheer shoes and a big bow in my hair. She took me to the gym where at least sixty girls had shown up for the competition. The first things I saw were cheerleaders doing high level tumbling on the gym floor with no fear. The upperclassmen led us in warm-ups, and they seemed nice. A lot of the girls I met had been cheering since they were five and six years old. I saw a lot of talent in the room, so I knew it would not be easy to
From this interview I have learned a lot about my athletic friend, Franchesca. I learned a lot about the sport of gymnastics and the complexities of it. Her life is so foreign from mine. I live in the small town of Pillager, Minnesota, while she lives in a big city and travels the county to compete with her team. Our lifestyles are completely different and this interview has really opened my eyes up to what her life is really compacted with.
I had a strange childhood most people would think. I had always been very serious about gymnastics so I had been homeschooled sense the age of 8 to help give me more time in the gym, this meant I spent monday through sunday 8am to 5pm in the gym. It took over my whole
As gymnastics developed more and more, there was a controversy of the participation of boys and girls in American gymnastics. While girls gymnastics was still trying to develop, boys gymnastics was becoming a nationwide sport (isport, gymnastics). All boys participating in the sport were taught how to perform specific activities on each different apparatus. They were taught a specific technique to be able to master each and ...
Naturally, I faced the competition of other gymnasts, however, meets were not where my most valuable lessons were learned. The impact was greater in times I wanted to quit, and didn’t. For instance, my flyway, a skill I acquired as a child, became impossible for me to execute as a teenager. Each time I attempted to perform it, I froze, fear lingering in my mind. Frustrated, I contemplated abandoning my passion, yet, due to my persistence, I overcame the obstacle. I found quitting would never provide me the satisfaction I hungered for. Gymnastics also challenged my body. I suffered more injuries than the average gymnast with broken feet, fingers, toes, and elbows, a concussion, and two stress fractures in two years. My final injury, a torn labrum, resulted in hip surgery, six months of physical therapy, and the death of my college gymnastics dream. Through disaster emerged strength to cope with every roadblock I encounter. All of my life I had worked towards that goal, and with the lift of a scalpel, it was shattered. Thankfully, the qualities gymnastics has given me has transferred to every aspect of my life including my academic career. I have put in just as much effort in the classroom as I have in the
I have been a dancer since the age of 3. My earliest memory of dance was when I was too terrified to go on stage during a recital and I refused to go on no matter how much they tried to push me. Up until the age of about 12, dance had been just a hobby or an extracurricular activity. In fact, I didn’t even enjoy going to dance. I didn’t have friends there and I wasn’t that good of a dancer. It wasn’t until I participated in Dance Bermuda’s summer dance intensive in collaboration with the American Ballet Theatre in 2012, that I realized that I had a passion for dance. At the program, I was exposed to other dancers that were my age and older and most of them were much more advanced than I. So to avoid being the worst dancer in the program, I took to YouTube and watched hours and hours of dance videos. I researched all the ways to improve my ballet technique. I can remember trying to practice my pirouettes in the kitchen and falling onto the table and knocking a whole bunch of things over. I was determined to be as good as the other girls in the program. By the end of the two weeks I was fired up, motivated, and ready to get back to class after the summer.
Growing up, one of my priorities was dance. I started dancing at age five at the City Performing Arts Academy and at fifteen I began taking classes at Elite Dance Academy. From early on in my dance career, I aspired to be just like the older dancers at my studio. They were such beautiful dancers and I dreamed of growing up to be as talented as they were. I remember in one of my classes we were given the opportunity to watch the advanced ballet class dance. This was the first time I ever saw dancers en pointe. I was utterly awestruck. I could not wrap my head around how these girls could so gracefully and seemingly effortlessly dance on their toes; however, I knew from that moment that I wanted nothing more than to dance en pointe. Soon, I realized
They reported that the foremost reasons for leaving the sport were psychological fatigue, general health, and difficult loads (Barynina & Vaitsekhovskii, 1992). Rhythmic gymnasts, those who specialized earlier and spent more hours training from age 4 to 16 years, rated their health lower and experienced less fun (Law et al., 2007). Despite early specialization being beneficial to attain elite-level skill in a sport, intense training in a single sport and the exclusion of others should be delayed until adolescence to optimize success, while minimizing the potential for
“When overzealous parents and coaches impose adult standards on children’s sports the result can be activities that are neither satisfying nor beneficial to children,” says Statsky (para. 1). This explains how some parents and coaches try to live their sporting dreams vicariously through their child athletes. Also, Jessica Statsky talks about how keeping score during sporting events allows children to focus more on winning than anything else. Children are pushed to a limit where the game is no longer about th...
As a society we have the ability to change the ways in which our elite gymnasts are learning gymnastics. We need to redirect the teachings of the coaches and the parent involvement in order to achieve a atmosphere in which gymnasts can explore, learn and gain gymnastic abilities in which they feel they can handle. “ Over the last 20 years there have been many publications on coaching as it relates to sport psychology or sport pedeology. No theoretical framework, however, exsits for explaining which factors are most important in the coaching process and which relationships among these factors are most significant.” (Cote pg.1) I propose that we create an environment with a stress on healthy dieting, good exercise and less strenuous workouts. Not an environment where winning is the prime concern. There are man...
As the season progressed, competition started getting fiercer. I was up against girls running at a 5A level, yet, I was able to hold my own. Finally there came a tiny light at the end of the tunnel; it seemed as though I was getting closer and closer to accomplishing my goal. Along with my undefeated title came a huge target painted on my back. I religiously checked "Rocky Preps" every day to see if the competition was gaining on me. It seemed that every time I had improved, there was someone right behind me, running their personal best too. I trained during the weeks before regionals like I had never trained before. Each day my stomach became more twisted with knots that looped around every part of my stomach. I don't think I had ever been that nervous in my whole life.
I had been an entertainer for as long as I can remember, and although my sport has changed over the years, performing continued to be a major part of my life up until my sophomore year. I started dancing when I was only three years old, but I decided to do cheerleading instead when I was seven. Despite being naturally quiet and reserved, the stage has always been the one place where I have felt comfortable being the center of attention. I have done both school and competition cheer, but the latter was my whole world. There was no better feeling than winning with my team, which is why I was devastated when a tumbling injury forced me to quit for the season. Tearing my ACL last year was one of the biggest challenges that I have ever faced because
During the semester, I learned a lot on how to deal with psychological distress and how as an athletic trainer I should deal with athletes to overcome their situation and be there for them. Throughout my time as an athletic training student, I always liked to observe my preceptors on how they deal with athletics that are having psychological distress after injuries, and how as an athletic trainer I should handle these situations in a professional manner. There is one situation in particular that occurred during the King’s College football season that I would like to discuss.
All of the hard work, practice, and preparation for today, this day. My team had worked months in preparation for the competition. The choreography was a challenge and pushed us to our limits each and every practice. The day after our practices was brutal, my arms and legs aching barely able to amble around the house. All for this day, for today. Will it be worth it, I wonder?