Vaulting Ambitions : SCATS’ Hyper Young Gymnasts Are Hoping for Olympic Gold

Three afternoons a week, at about 3:30, a small group of girls, students at Marina High School in Huntington Beach, walks across the school’s athletic field, through a break in the chain-link fence and into a world their classmates could never imagine.

It is a world of ferocious dedication and quiet passion, of spectacular physicality and almost Zen-like concentration. It is a world in which it is often impossible to be sure which is stronger, the body or the will. It is a world of deprivation and isolation and, sometimes, pain.

But there is a reward. And each girl knows that if she attains it, it will be the sweetest moment of all.

They look older, somehow, when they’re out on the mat, among the jungle of apparatus that is covered with a ubiquitous layer of chalk dust. Their faces lose the wide-open girlish quality; instead, the mouths become drawn and thin, the eyes tightly focused and hard. They are the kind of eyes you see around an operating table, peering over the masks with the same methodical intensity.

Yet the five girls who make up the elite team of the Southern California Acro Team are no automatons. Rather, they are friendly, intelligent, attractive and self-assured. They are well-adjusted and popular with their classmates. They are all honor students.

They are also five of the finest female gymnasts in the world. And that is where any semblance of a typical high school life ends.

For 21 hours each week, split among a total of seven workouts, Robin Carter, Stacey Gunthorpe, Sabrina Mar, Kristi Phillips and Doe Yamashiro work out at the warehouse-like gym on Research Drive that is the Huntington Beach headquarters of the Southern California Acro Team, probably the most famous gymnastics school in the country. Since its beginnings in 1963, SCATS, as it is popularly known, has placed at least one female gymnast on every U. S. Olympic team. There have been more SCATS gymnasts placed on U. S. national and Olympic teams than from any other gymnastics school or academy. In 1984, five girls on the eight-member Olympic team were SCATS gymnasts.

“That’s a pretty phenomenal accomplishment,” says Don Peters, head coach at SCATS. “It had never been done before and probably never will be done again. And this year we’ve got five contenders (for the Olympic team) out of a field of maybe 12 or 13 nationwide.”

While Peters says that “any bets for medals (in women’s gymnastics) are going to be long shots for the whole American team” at September’s Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea, he adds that three SCATS gymnasts have a chance if they make the U.S. team: Phillips on balance beam, Mar in floor exercise and Gunthorpe on uneven parallel bars. However, he says, spots on the team are not determined by scores in individual events but on total scores in the all-around competition at the Olympic trials in August.

The girls know this well. And they want very badly to be Olympians. Some of them say they have dreamed of it since they were small children. They may have worked toward that single goal for 10 years or more. Some have moved to Orange County from homes around the country, sometimes with their families, sometimes alone. All have given up a more normal high-school social life to spend their early mornings and late afternoons in the gym, which is situated just behind Marina High School, where four of them attend classes (Yamashiro, whose home is in Gardena, is a Marina graduate who plans to enter Stanford in the fall on a gymnastics scholarship).

And they have done it in order to train with Peters in Huntington Beach, and perhaps to become worldbeaters.

Such an exalted position in sport never comes quickly and often has quite common and even humble beginnings. Ask Peters how his elite athletes got started, and he doesn’t have to go far to show you.

“Like them,” says Peters, pointing through a door to the other half of the SCATS gym, where mostly tots in shorts or leotards are jumping, tumbling, swinging on apparatus--exploding with energy in one of the SCATS classes for young children.

All of the five girls on the elite team--the highest level a gymnast can achieve--agree. Although none began at SCATS, nearly all use the word hyper to describe themselves as young children.

“I was 8, and I was just bouncing off the walls, doing cartwheels off the furniture,” says Yamashiro, 18, the oldest of the five. At age 13, she says, she began to dedicate herself to the sport because “I always had a dream (about the Olympics). It was something I’d seen people do on TV. And I said, ‘I can do that too.’ ”

Phillips, 16, says she knew at age 8 that she wanted to be a serious gymnast. “I wanted to be the best in the world.”

She eventually moved from her home in Baton Rouge, La., to train with famed Hungarian coach Bela Karolyi in Houston, and then to Huntington Beach to train with Peters. She now lives with her mother in Huntington Beach while her father continues to live and work in Baton Rouge.

Carter, at 15 the youngest of the five, moved from her home in Houston--where she, too, trained with Karolyi--to come to Orange County and train with SCATS. She lives near the gym at a home known to the gymnasts as the “SCATS House,” a sort of home away from home, managed by a married couple, for gymnasts whose parents do not live nearby. She began her career at age 8 in a church-sponsored gymnastics class “doing flips and things.” She says she knew “about an hour after that” that she wanted to be an Olympian.

Beginning their careers with varying levels of interest and dedication, all five girls say they eventually learned that they were not only naturally talented but realized that they had become highly motivated. And their search for better coaching and better training facilities led, as it has for other Olympic hopefuls, to Huntington Beach and SCATS.

The reason is basically twofold, say the girls: SCATS emphasizes precision of technique instead of strength and repetitive exercises, which leads to more controlled routines and fewer injuries. And it’s relatively cheap.

“We’ve tried very hard over the years to create a training environment where costs to the families are at a minimum,” Peters says. “It can cost more than $20,000 a year to train a gymnast somewhere else. Here it costs somewhere around $1,200.”

The difference is a built-in labor pool: parents.

While the coaching is done by a trained staff--Peters and four assistants coach the elite team--much of the ancillary work, such as setting up and taking down apparatus, maintaining the gym, administering the program and raising funds, is done principally by parent volunteers. And this philosophy percolates down to the smallest student.

The students can get very small indeed. At the four SCATS training centers in Southern California (in Huntington Beach, Anaheim, Mission Viejo and Walnut), coordination classes are held for toddlers as young as 1 year, and gymnastics is taught at every level up to the elite skill designation. All told, SCATS is now training about 3,000 gymnasts, Peters says.

SCATS was founded by Bud Marquette, the women’s gymnastics coach who helped bring the sport to national prominence in the early 1970s with students such as Cathy Rigby. Marquette’s philosophy, Peters says, was to accept into SCATS “any child who had the desire and the talent to be great.” Marquette retired from coaching in the mid-1970s.

Although SCATS is one of nearly 70 gymnastics clubs and schools in Southern California, according to Peters, only it, and a few others are nonprofit organizations. It also is the only one that consistently has turned out Olympic-caliber gymnasts.

Peters, who coached the 1984 Olympic team and will coach the team at this year’s Summer Games, says that because SCATS does not have an owner who profits from the operation, all money received can be put directly back into the organization.

Still, Peters says, the organization often loses money. The U.S. Olympic Committee and the U.S. Gymnastics Federation (the sport’s governing body) don’t subsidize day-to-day training expenses, he says.

However, he says, Olympic years bring with them giant leaps in SCATS enrollment. After the 1984 Games, the organization had a 50% increase in sign-ups.

“We’re just about at the point now where we can feed ourselves completely from a talent standpoint,” Peters says, referring to the number of youngsters in training. “You have to remember that the kid who possesses world-class talent is a very rare animal. The ratio is about the same as the number of people who make it to the pros in football. They’re one in a thousand as far as physical talent.”

The workouts are not rushed or frantic, but no time is wasted. Peters, the U.S. national team coach from 1980-86, is no Woody Hayes; he is usually quiet and intense, eyes absorbing the minutiae of each routine, earnest, encouraging, pointing out things the girls cannot see and perhaps cannot feel themselves doing.

“Gymnastics is so technical,” he says. “A female gymnast might do 90 neuromuscular skills in one routine, and nothing you do on the balance beam, for instance, is remotely like what you do on the uneven bars. It’s the coach correcting a little tiny technical thing that makes the trick much better.”

Such training techniques, however, don’t ignore strength, for each of the girls is tremendously strong. The warm-up session alone includes handstand push-ups, much abdominal work and the kind of radical stretching that might put Jane Fonda in a walker. They are not heavily muscled, but they are almost all muscle; Peters estimates their body fat at 10%, compared to an average of about 18% for girls their age.

They are also smaller and thinner than their counterparts of 15 and 20 years ago, Peters says. (The elite team ranges in size from Gunthorpe, who stands 4 feet, 10 inches and weighs 89 pounds, to Yamashiro, who is 5 feet, 2 1/2 inches tall and weighs 106 pounds.) And they perform routines that their predecessors wouldn’t have dreamed of.

“Cathy Rigby was a great gymnast,” Peters says. “But I have 9-year-olds now who can do more things than she did.”

Today, he says, the elite gymnast needs “a real explosive quality. Quick, explosive and strong.”

Watching a SCATS workout confirms his statement. It is one thing to watch a gymnastics competition on television, but it is quite another to stand 10 feet away from, say, 17-year-old Gunthorpe, and listen to the uneven bars creak and groan as she swings with breathtaking speed through her routine. Or to listen to Carter’s heavily taped bare feet smack onto the thin leather covering of the balance beam after she completes a flip. Or to watch Mar catapult into a Yurchenko vault in which she seems simply to spin off into the air, higher and higher.

“Just children, huh?” says Mary Wright, an assistant coach, watching the ballet.

Yes and no. They may range in age from 15 to 18, but they know precisely why they are there and what they are doing. If Yamashiro, for instance, misses a landing at the end of a particularly difficult tumbling run and takes a pratfall, she picks herself up quickly and silently and simply walks to the other side of the mat and waits for her turn to do it again. When Gunthorpe nearly falls on her head after becoming tangled with assistant coach Mark Davis, who is spotting her on her tumbling run, Peters merely says, “OK, get up. You’re all right. Do one in the pit.”

She is all right. And after performing the run into a deeply padded tumbling pit, she tries it again on the mat. The run works.

“The mental part has to do with confidence,” Yamashiro says. “You have to know you can do it in order to do it.”

But it can’t be done alone, the girls say. Even though Peters established a rule that each girl must say at least 10 encouraging things to the others during every workout, the quota is passed during the first few minutes. Even though each girl knows she is competing against the others for a berth on the Olympic team, each shares with the others a unique friendship.

“It’s because we’re rivals that we’re good friends,” says Mar, 17. “With Kristi, for instance, she pushes me and I push her. It’s better for training that way. All my best friends are here in the gym. You can’t find friends like that at school. Other people don’t know what a true workout is. They think it’s something you do at Holiday Health Spa.”

Phillips says the girls “are all best friends. We get to know each other inside out.”

The coaches are also considered friends and confidants.

“You get to see them when they’re down and crying as well as when they’re happy,” Wright says. “They don’t have to hide anything from you.”

In the end, the girls say, the only people who can truly understand the world-class gymnast’s life is a world-class gymnast.

“I think gymnasts are probably the most stressed-out people there are,” says Mar, a Monterey Park resident who commutes to school and morning workouts. “A lot of people at school complain that they’ve got a chemistry or physics test the next day, and they’re worried about it or they don’t have time to study. But we do all that, and we have workouts too. And you’d miss school before you’d miss a workout in the season.”

And, she says, if a gymnast should fail, “all the hard feelings go on yourself, not someone else. If you fail, you know it’s your own fault.”

For the five elites, the universe spins around the gym.

“I never realized until I got older how much this is a part of my life,” Carter says.

Says Phillips: “You don’t know what you’re getting into when you’re young. Then you’re fearless. But gymnastics has a lot of good that comes out of it. We’re doing things no one else can do.”

One of the compensations is travel to competitions throughout the world.

“A lot of kids never get to go to the places we’ve gone,” Gunthorpe says. “We see things a lot of people our age haven’t seen.” Says Mar: “Most teen-agers don’t get to travel the world. You get to be pretty popular at school too when you’re followed around by TV cameras.”

All five girls acknowledge the sacrifices their parents have made. Whether the parents have moved to be near them, or have given them moral and financial support, the girls say they feel, always, that the backing is there.

“With my parents, I’ve always felt that everything was our decision rather than just mine,” Yamashiro says.

“My parents,” a serious-faced Gunthorpe says, “would do anything for me.”

Still, say the five Olympic prospects, it’s never easy, particularly now, with the Summer Games beckoning.

“From now on,” Yamashiro says, “it’s going to be a lot of hard work. A lot of pain and sweat.”

Peters says he actually “plays down the Olympics” in the girls’ minds. If too much importance is placed on the competition at Seoul, he says, “it can eat you up, a la Debbie Thomas,” the highly touted figure skater who won a bronze medal at this year’s Winter Games in Calgary, Canada, after skating what was, for her, a sub-par routine.

“You have to keep it in perspective,” Peters says. “The truth is that life will go on, the sun will come up, your mother’s still going to love you no matter what. We tell them not to go in trying to win or trying not to lose. Do the best you can in your own performance. That’s a healthy attitude toward sports.

“I tell them if you go to the Olympics and do your best, you’ll remember the Olympics fondly for the rest of your life, no matter what happens. But if you don’t do your best, it’ll eat you up.”

It’s a hard life, a life apart, and it must be lived while one is startlingly young. But there is that great reward. . . .

“There have been one or two occasions when I thought of giving up,” Yamashiro says. “But those were really three-second thoughts.

“Right now, I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

THE SCATS ELITE TEAM AT A GLANCE

Sabrina Mar: Current Pan-American all-around champion. Former U.S. national all-around champion. Only U.S. finalist in the 1987 World Championships. Four-time member of the U.S. national team.

Kristi Phillips: Current U.S. national all-around champion. Two-time American Cup champion. Member of the 1987 Pan-American and World Championship teams.

Doe Yamashiro:Three-time U.S. national team member. Member of the 1986 Goodwill Games team.

Stacey Gunthorpe: Three-time U.S. national team member. Member of the 1987 Pan-American and World Championship teams.

Robin Carter: Member of the 1987 U.S. national team. Currently rated 10th in the nation in all-around competition.

Patrick Mott is a regular contributor to Orange County Life.