Gymnastics Enters My Life

When I was teaching elementary physical education, I would make sure that at the end of the day all of the students left the building safely (unless I had to leave quickly to coach).  It really amazed me how many of the kids wanted to hang around the school.  They would beg me to come into the gym.  Finally, I gave in.

That was when I started an intramural program for the upper grades 4 and 5.  They would stay after school on Tuesday and Thursday from November through January.  I wanted to extend the schedule, but my coaching duties in football and baseball took up the fall and the spring.

We pretty much had what you would expect for intramurals: basketball, floor hockey, and soccer.  I was really surprised when they asked me to do gymnastics.  I had introduced them to the basics of rolling frontward and backward.  They had all progressed to pretty good cartwheels, and a few had started on round offs.

So, in my last year at Young, we spent many of those Tuesday and Thursday afternoons working on building their skills in gymnastics.  They got past round offs.  They went to back handsprings.  Then they connected these into a tumbling pass.  At the end of that winter, almost all of them, boys and girls, had developed miniature floor routines.

I left Young after that year.  I have often lamented the enthusiasm I left behind in those kids.  But when I went to North I was going to coach football as an assistant and baseball as the head coach, so I left behind the idea of gymnastics.  Or so I thought.

The athletic director heard from somewhere (probably his wife with whom I taught at Young) that I had a gymnastics background.  He needed a gymnastics coach.  I just couldn't see myself coaching gymnastics just after I had finished football and just before I started baseball, so I passed.

Four years later, I was out of football.  I had just married my wife and was starting a new chapter.  Football was too much, and the head coach and I did not see eye to eye.  So my fall was free, but the winter wasn't.  The AD had remembered my gymnastics background and asked me to be the assistant coach.

That was a great experience because I knew the basics of gymnastics, but the head coach, Diane Cole, filled in the gaps so that I was more than just that elementary school teacher.  I could actually coach gymnastics.  I never dreamed that this would lead to the most successful coaching experience of my life.  But that is a story for another time.

For anyone who is in the teaching profession reading this - actually in any profession - when an opportunity comes that challenges you outside your comfort zone, at least think about embracing the idea.  Gymnastics wasn't the first time for me, but it definitely wasn't the last.  I can look back and see that all the experiences the challenges gave me are, like the commercial says, priceless.