Gym Dandy : Resurgence of Gymnastics Turns Warehouse to Matted Classroom

In a converted Chatsworth warehouse, dozens of children are flipping over gymnastics. “It’s the most fun I ever have,” said Jonathan Ham, a pugnacious 7-year-old who had just finished assaulting a pommel horse at the California Sun Gym, a private club run by U.S. Junior Olympic Coach Dan Connelly.

Once in the doldrums, gymnastics--and gymnastic clubs--are enjoying a resurgence, one that’s directly related to the success of the 1984 Olympics.

“Every club in the United States really benefited from the ’84 Games,” Connelly said.

Like figure skating, gymnastics gets a giant boost every four years when the Olympics focus attention on the speciality sports. Both figure skating and gymnastics have been especially lucky in the past two decades: Their Olympic performers have become true stars, not just medal winners. Figure skating’s Dorothy Hamill even had a haircut named after her.

In gymnastics at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, West Germany, pint-sized Russian Olga Korbut transcended politics by enchanting Americans with fearless back flips on the balance beam. Four years later, a pouting Romanian named Nadia Comaneci captured America’s hearts and touched off a watershed year for gymnastics.

Until then, said Steve Luce, program director at Sun Gym, “Gymnastics was usually taught as ‘acrobatics’ at dance studios. I taught at a studio where we had only 20 kids in the program. They put us in the small room. The big room was for girls doing ballet. But after Nadia, our gymnastics enrollment shot up over 100 and we got to use the big room.”

By 1978, Connelly had been coaching gymnastics at Cal State Northridge for five years, winning an NCAA Division II title and producing 25 All-Americans. But he resigned that spring and opened his own club in a warehouse on Reseda Boulevard. Gymnastics still was peaking because of Comaneci, and Sun Gym opened with 300 students.

In 1979, Connelly made plans to open a second gym, this one in Simi Valley. He was betting on Kurt Thomas to emerge as a big star at the 1980 Olympics and give gymnastics another shot of publicity. But it never happened.

After then-President Jimmy Carter ordered U.S. athletes to boycott the Moscow games, Kurt Thomas never got the chance to become a celebrity. Without the nurturing effect of the Olympics in 1980, gymnastics went into a slump all over the country, and Sun Gym felt the crunch, enrollment dropping to slightly more than 200. The Simi Valley gym was put on hold.

“The boycott really hurt us,” Connelly, 39, said. “We struggled badly.”

The gymnastics community, of course, was counting heavily on the 1984 Olympics to end the slump. A continued downward spiral in interest would have rocked the foundations of the sport, especially because colleges were giving up gymnastics--from a high of 200, there are only about 50 colleges fielding gymnastics teams today.

“Another boycott would have been absolutely disastrous for the sport,” Connelly said. “We were just hoping the Olympics would come off, even if the Russians weren’t going to be there.”

Not only did the Olympics come off, but the results made Connelly do cartwheels. Mary Lou Retton’s toothy smile and Mitch Gaylord’s chiseled profile got people to pay attention to gymnastics again. And fast.

“Our phones started ringing during the Olympics and really haven’t stopped,” Luce said.

Immediately after the Olympics, Sun Gym’s enrollment shot up to 450. Even the expected post-Olympic slowdown never really happened, testimony to the impact Retton and Gaylord made on the national consciousness. “The effects of what they did are still being felt,” Luce said.

Sun Gym reaped benefits from the last Olympics, although a share of the L.A. Olympic Committee’s $225 million surplus was not included. That money went to local parks and recreation gymnastics programs instead of private clubs.

Three years ago, Connelly moved Sun Gym to larger headquarters in Chatsworth. Six months ago, he finally opened a 6,000-square-foot facility in Simi Valley. Today, the Chatsworth club has 300 members, Simi Valley has 85. Even more significant for gymnastics is that boys are again taking up the sport.

“For girls, ballet and gymnastics have been about it as far as private lessons,” Luce said. “But gymnastics always ranked low among boys because of other sports like football, basketball and baseball.”

Among the Valley-area’s 11 gymnastics clubs, Sun Gym has the most comprehensive program for boys--120 are enrolled at the Chatsworth facility, which has exclusively male equipment such as rings, a high bar and pommel horse. Instead of playing such conventional seasonal sports as football and baseball, the boys are swinging all year round at Sun Gym.

“My son doesn’t ever think he’ll play football,” Karen Jensen said as Roger, 9, chalked up his hands for a trip on the high bar. “From the time he was 5 he would only participate in sports where his body was the toy. Gymnastics is perfect for him.”

The success of Gaylord--in Hollywood as well in the Olympics--has been a key to sparking boys’ interest in gymnastics and is especially pleasing to Connelly. It was Connelly who developed Gaylord, working with him for six years, including his four years at Grant High.

“Dan was an extremely important influence on the type of gymnast I became,” said Gaylord, whose bold style helped the U.S. team win the gold medal in ’84. “He helped me overcome the fear factor. He always came up with more and more challenging things to do and had confidence in you to do them. You ended up trusting him and learning that nothing was impossible.”

When he was 14, Gaylord was asked to do a difficult backward maneuver on the high bar. “I was so scared I hid in the bathroom,” he said. “But Dan just walked in calmly and said, ‘C’mon, Mitch, you’re going up on the high bar.’ I did, and it was easier than I thought.”

A large framed photo of Gaylord adorns a wall at the Chatsworth gym, motivation for future Olympians.

“I want to be in the Olympics just like Mitch,” Ham said.

Gaylord has retired from gymnastics to pursue an acting career. He is scheduled to be the host of a television series called “Fan Club” starting in September. Without him at the gym, the little gymnasts get their inspiration these days by watching Monroe High graduate Charles Lakes, Connelly’s current protege and one of America’s top gymnasts. Last year, Lakes finished sixth in the Goodwill Games.

The momentum provided by the ’84 Olympics is reflected in the enthusiasm of the students, said Luce, a former CSUN gymnast. “We used to get kids whose parents made them do it,” he said. “Now the kids are eager to be here, which makes it easy to teach them. You can’t teach anybody unless he wants to learn.”

In the 3,000-square-foot gym, children as young as 2 1/2 learn Olympics routines on Olympics equipment. They are taught body position and form in small classes--the student-instructor ratio is 8 to 1. The 20-foot-high ceiling provides enough room for a flier like Lakes to dismount upward off the 8-foot high bar without crashing through the roof.

“Nothing makes sense for the first few months,” said Barbara Fessenden of Northridge, who was watching her son, Brian, practice the vault, which stands at the end of a regulation 75-foot runway. “It’s hard to understand how all the routines fit together. At first you don’t know if they’re doing it right or wrong. But then it all kind of jells.”

Behind every young gymnast, of course, is a mother with a station wagon. Basic membership at the gym is $25 a month for an hourlong weekly lesson. But when a youngster begins to see improvement, it’s hard to keep him away from the gym. And, unlike other sports, gymnastics is not seasonal.

“It goes on forever,” said Karen Jensen of Northridge, “and is very time consuming. Roger doesn’t look like he’s going to quit. There’s no end in sight.”

Not that she doesn’t appreciate what gymnastics has done for her son. “It’s a marvelous discipline,” she said. “The kids see what their bodies can do at top shape. And when that happens, they don’t want to get into drugs.”

Connelly believes in letting each student advance at his own pace. “The single most important thing in our program is that the kids have a good time,” he said.

There is a joyful exuberance at the gym, young boys at play, doing what they enjoy. “They let boys be boys,” Barbara Fessenden said. “It isn’t run like a ballet school, but they are expected to be disciplined.”

The 10 instructors at the gym all have backgrounds in gymnastics, mainly at college. “Most of them were fairly good,” Luce said, pointing out that nobody usually goes into the sport as a career. “There’s no college degree in coaching gymnastics. And there’s no money in coaching.”

As a result, Sun Gym has no full-time coaches. Connelly makes ends meet by putting on clinics all over the country. Even his position as coach of the U.S. team at the recent international Coup d’Excellence competition in Montreal was “for honor, not money,” he said.

“You couldn’t live on what a gymnastics coach makes,” said Luce, who has other part-time coaching jobs related to gymnastics. “There’s only one reason you do it--for love.”