Our Mission

Did you know they’re over 30 variations of a cartwheel?

I like to say our mission, is: “we put the fun in fundamentals “The fundamentals of gymnastics, like any sport or any learned skill are important to develop a strong foundation. A strong foundation is necessary to build greater skill or difficulty upon.You don’t build a house on quicksand, you build it on solid ground. Gymnastics skills are similar. It requires a strong foundation to build the highest and greatest skill.

However, gymnastics is physically tiring. It is also emotionally draining and can test our resolve. That is one of the reasons why it is so great for teaching life skills. Through the process of learning gymnastics, we have to overcome the embarrassment of falling down, making mistakes, not learning something as quickly as the person standing next to us and ….. you’re doing all this in front of an audience. The other students in the class, the coaches, and your parents watching.

Making mistakes is how we grow.  

We learn from those mistakes, not only do we learn the gymnastics skill but we also learn the life skills that carry us throughout adulthood. We learn to persevere, push through discomfort and embarrassment, to get back up after we fall. We learn to hold ourselves accountable. To set goals, work toward them and achieve them. However, the process of learning these life skills is not easy. As a coach sometimes I feel like I spend more time working on minimizing fears with children, and building trust than I ever do teaching gymnastics skills!

The gymnastics skills are the easy part. It’s everything else that’s challenging. The process of doing this usually requires a very healthy balance between hard work and fun. Children can’t just work hard and only work hard and never have any time to play or feel like this is fun. Otherwise, they’ll be miserable and turn their hearts off completely to gymnastics. Because of this, years ago, I began to focus my coaching style and philosophy around this fact.

While stressing the importance of fundamentals, my classes needed to have a healthy mix of fun in order to achieve optimal results. It’s sort of the concept of a spoon full of sugar Makes the medicine go down. There’s many aspects of learning gymnastics skill that are very similar to swallowing horrible tasting medicine. I have found, that the best technique is to be sure that the spoon is well sugared.

I consider it a priority to make my classes as fun as they can be while teaching and reinforcing fundamentals. There’s only so much hard and challenging that I can present to children before they need a morale boost and then I have to insert the fun or do my best to do both simultaneously, which is a challenge but can be done!