Right when I landed my dismount off of bars, I knew we had made it to State and I knew I had made the right decision.

As an 8th grader at Lincoln Middle School, I have always had the passion for gymnastics.  The feeling of flipping through the air is one of the best feelings in the world, in my opinion.  I train at IGI, which is short for, Illinois Gymnastics Institute in Hinsdale, Illinois, and train with some of my best friends.  IGI is one of the top gymnastics training facilities in the entire country. With this, it is very intense and takes a lot out of you, not only physically, but mentally as well.  Until a few weeks ago, I enjoyed this intense type of training.

Gymnastics is like no other sport.  The running, the jumping, and the flipping requires every muscle in your body to work.  Not only is this a physical sport, but you must also be extremely strong mentally in order to succeed.  Many people don’t understand the mental aspect because if you do not perform the skills in gymnastics, you can almost never experience the mentally stability that is very necessary in this sport.  There are four events: Vault, Bars, Beam and Floor. Vault has always been my favorite, despite the fact that I broke my leg on this event just a few months ago.

This incident occurred at my first practice back in the gym after competing at level 8 regionals in Kentucky.  I was in a great mood because I was able to be with my whole team again after a weekend away. My best friend on the team, Kathleen, ran up to me and gave me a huge hug to congratulate me since she did not compete with me at regionals.  We started on vault that day and I was very happy. I ran down the runway and did my first vault beautifully! My coach, Doug, who I was also very close with, gave me a big high five and just said, “Wow”. I walked back down and got in line to do another vault, hoping it would be just as good as the other.  I started down the runway just like any other turn, and just as I was about to perform the vault, I collapsed to the ground. My tibia had broken and I was out for the next couple months. I was heartbroken.

Now, you may be thinking that that is what my story is about, but it isn’t.  That was a contributing factor, but the decision that I had to make was whether or not to continue with club gymnastics, or switch to high school gymnastics since I was going into my Freshman year.  You also may be thinking that this isn’t a very hard decision, but with my situation, it absolutely was. At IGI, no one did high school gymnastics. No one even talked about it. No one even considered it an option.  So why would I? Well, I had some friends at school, who were already on the high school gymnastics team and some who were planning on being a part of the team. One of my best friends at the time, Collette, was also a gymnast, but she went to a different training facility than me.  Collette was planning on joining the team so everytime we would hang out, she would always tell me to do it too. At first, I didn’t even consider what she was saying. Later on though when I heard my other friend, Cristina, who was already on the team saying how fun and laid back it was, I started to consider it.  As I recovered from my injury, going to the gym, day after day, hours on hours, I was starting to get sick of it. For almost 5 years, my mom would pick me up from school at 2 P.M. Every day, I’d eat in the car, go to practice until 7, come home, do homework, go to bed. Every. Single. day. This used to be normal for me, but as I got older I realized that I didn’t think it was something I wanted to do anymore.  When I started hearing about high school gymnastics from my friends, I thought maybe that’s what I wanted to do. But, I kept going to IGI, for the next month and every day in the car, I would sit there with a blank face and almost never say a word. My mom would frequently ask me questions such as; “What’s wrong?”, or “Why are you in a bad mood?”. I just didn’t know how to answer. I thought it would be embarrassing to even tell anyone at the gym, or my parents, that I wanted to do high school, since that was almost unheard of in Hinsdale.   One day, I got the urge to tell Kathleen. The first thing I said was, “I might quit IGI”. She looked at me with a blank face and didn’t know what to say. She asked me why and I told her that I am considering joining the high school gymnastics team. At first, she almost didn’t believe me, but after I told her I wasn’t kidding she was devastated. She told me that she supported my decision, but didn’t want me to quit, obviously, because we were very good friends. One thing that she did not do, made me very happy. When I told someone about the thoughts I’d been having, I was expecting to be judged.  She didn’t judge me at all. That made me feel very good. After that, I was almost sure that I wanted to join the high school team.

The next step was to tell my parents.  I knew they would want me to do whatever made me happy, but I wasn’t sure how they would react to this.  The day after I told Kathleen, my mom asked me again, “What’s wrong?” This time, instead of just saying the usual, “nothing”, I built up the courage to tell her.  I told her the exact same thing I told Kathleen and she was so happy. She told me that she was totally on board with me doing high school gymnastics. At that moment, the greatest feeling of relief rushed through my body.  I knew for sure that high school gymnastics was what I wanted to do.

It was so hard for me to express what I wanted to do, but once I did, I never felt better.  I woke up the next morning with a great feeling; I had finally made my decision.