Top Gymnasts Get Together at Aztec Club

Just west of San Diego State’s Peterson Gym is a smaller gymnasium where the basketball hoops are bolted to the walls, the floors are covered with springboards and spongy mats and white chalk dust fills the air.

To the athletes who inhabit this space--some as much as six days a week, four hours a day--it is simply the “Mole Hole,” home of the SDSU Aztec Gymnastics Program.

Beginning this morning and continuing through Sunday, 90 gymnasts representing 23 teams from across the country will converge on the SDSU campus for the ninth Holiday Classic Gymnastics Invitational.

Aztec Gymnastics, a club team affiliated with the school but not involved in NCAA competition, will be represented by four gymnasts in a meet the Nebraska School of Gymnastics should win, according to Aztec Coach Darla Franz.

A perfect all-around score for a gymnast is 40.0 (for four events), and the top three Nebraska gymnasts have an impressive 37.25 average. Several club members were on last year’s senior and junior national teams.

The Aztecs are averaging 34.00 points a meet. Franz said that Escondido’s California Gold is the strongest local team.

“We go back and forth,” Franz said. “Right now, we are in a little of a down year, and they (California Gold) are having an up year. This is a rebuilding year for us.”

Competing for the Aztecs will be Stacy Ramon, 11; Shelli George, 12; Katie Grupe, 15, and Kara Temple, 16. The team is without Wendy Ick, 9, who broke her right foot three weeks ago in training.

“They’re real young,” Franz said, “and still learning how to compete. They just haven’t had the experience of some of the other girls.”

Franz said approximately 10 to 15 of the girls scheduled to compete this weekend are Elite, the class from which the U.S. national and Olympic teams are selected.

San Diego has no Elite gymnasts; the Aztecs in this meet are Advanced Optional, several classes below. It is a complicated system, so complicated, Franz said, that even people in the business can get confused. It will be worse next year, when it goes from the current seven levels to 10.

“I get so mad at the USGF, (United States Gymnastics Federation)” Franz said, “it only makes it frustrating for the public to try and understand the system.”

Franz and her ex-husband, Aztec Gymnastics Director Ed Franz, are the driving forces behind the club. Darla competed at SDSU from 1966 to 1968, when Ed was coaching. The were married the next year.

” A lot of gymnasts marry their coaches,” Darla Franz said. “I think it has a lot to do with the closeness and the trust they put in their coaches.”

They have been divorced for five years but are good friends and run the gym together.

According to Ed Franz, this is the most important gymnastics meet in San Diego this year.

“We’re the only program here that gets involved in hosting competition of this caliber,” he said.

Said Darla Franz: “This is an established meet, and it brings good quality gymnastics to the public first hand, not on TV. And it gives the girls from San Diego a chance to perform in front of their friends. It’s a real festive meet, the whole atmosphere is fun for everyone.”

Franz said that of the 25 clubs in San Diego, only three have the proper facilities and equipment to host such a meet.

Ed Franz has been associated with Aztec Gymnastic for 22 years. When the university discontinued the collegiate program in May of 1985, Franz stayed to work with the club, as did the coaches and eight of the nine gymnasts.

Four years later, Teresa Rainford is the only one of those eight gymnasts attending SDSU. She still remembers how she heard about the program being dropped.

“I found out from a football player at study hall,” she said.

Rainford competed for one year and chose not to transfer because the university was honoring her scholarship for a year, and her grades were low.

“I wasn’t doing all that well academically,” she said, “and I figured, why go somewhere and pay for school?”

She is now working on a degree in sports medicine and helps coach the Class IV team.

SDSU dropping its collegiate team was indicative of what Ed Franz said is a disturbing national trend: the recurring elimination of gymnastics at the college, junior college and high school level, leaving young gymnasts nowhere to go.

“Gymnastics is being dropped as a varsity sport because of the cost of running such a program,” Franz said. “It is very expensive.”

A spring floor system for floor exercise costs $15,000. A set of uneven parallel bars runs approximately $2,000, and the cheapest piece of equipment, a vaulting horse, is $550.

“Schools with deficits in sports find gymnastics to be a detrimental sport,” he said.

Contributing to the excessive financial burdens are safety costs.

“As safety requirements go up,” he said, “so do the costs to provide for the safety of the gymnast.”

Worse still, Ed Franz said, is the lack of qualified coaches needed for the highly technical nature of the advanced levels.

“With the decline of the high-level programs,” he said, “and the proliferation of the low-level programs, we are no longer bringing gymnasts in, to stay and teach and coach. In San Diego, were simply losing the base of gymnasts and coaches. Across the country, the biggest crisis is the (lack of) training of coaches to provide for the athletes.”

Rainford, with her competitive background, said she is only qualified to coach at the beginning levels.

“I wouldn’t feel qualified to any other class,” she said. “It takes so much specialized training.”

Darla Franz has such training. She has produced gymnasts who have won all-around and event state championships and who have earned college scholarships.

She said that it takes intelligence, strength, flexibility, coordination and perseverance to succeed in gymnastics.

“There’s that perseverant personality that is so important,” she said. “(The gymnasts) set goals and take them to heart. It’s an intrinsic thing. They honestly believe they’ll make it to the Olympics. They never lose sight of that idea.”

Sacrifice is a major part of any sport, and gymnastics is no different.

“They definitely sacrifice,” Darla Franz said. “It’s year-round training. As an age-group gymnast, they constantly have to stay in good physical condition and keep up with other girls.

“And it’s mentally hard to keep them up. If they get sick, go on vacation or are injured, whatever takes them away from workouts, they see their teammates improving, and that breaks down their confidence.”

Much of a gymnast’s development can be improved, Darla Franz said, but “the strength of a Mary Lou (Retton) can’t be developed and the flexibility of a (Daniela) Silvas can’t be developed. Basic overall coordination can improve, and you can be coached for timing, but people that excel have it naturally to begin with.”

Darla Franz is tough on her athletes, but they respect her knowledge and her encouragement.

“Darla’s not very patient,” Kara Temple said, “but she’s a real good coach. She’s a motivator and she has good technical knowledge.”

Stacy Ramon, one of the Aztecs’ most talented gymnasts, said: “Darla pushes you and makes you work hard, but if I didn’t like the coaching, I wouldn’t be here.”

Franz said Ramon, who finished fifth all-around at state championships Class III Optionals last year, has great potential.

“She’s young, which gives her an edge right there,” Darla Franz said, “and she has an attitude to learn at a very quick pace. She doesn’t let things bother her. Her longevity will be longer because her frustration won’t pull her out of the sport. And she’s sharp.”

These gymnasts say they have learned many things from their association with the sport. Temple and Katie Grupe said that includes discipline, time-management--and bravery.

“I can handle getting yelled at,” Grupe said, a freshman at Mt. Carmel High School.

And because the high degree of risk in the tricks they try, they are more willing to attempt new things.

“You’re braver than most girls your age,” said Temple, who will compete for Grossmont High School when her club season is over.

George and Ramon said they have learned the benefits of hard work.

“I like to push myself,” George said. “It’s fun to set goals, and then set out and meet them.”

“When you work hard,” Ramon said, “and accomplish the things you set out to do, that feels good. It’s fun to win, and when you don’t, you just want to work harder.”

Gymnastics Notes

This is an optional meet only and will be conducted in two sessions today, at 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., with half the teams competing in each session. Four gymnasts compete for each team, and the top three scores are counted. The top four teams from each session and the top four gymnasts in individual events qualify for Sunday’s final round.