A Gymnast’s Fond Farewell : Profile: For 13 years, Ginger Collins worked at becoming a champ. Now, her mission accomplished, the Los Alamitos High grad is ready to move on.

Hers isn’t your average teen-agers’ room. Instead of clothes covering the carpet and a layer of dust on the shelves, the decor is made up of medals, ribbons, plaques and posters of famous gymnasts.

No interior decorator designed Ginger Collins’ room. She did it herself, through 13 years of hard work.

But now, at age 18, Collins is turning in her leotard and heading off to the University of Maryland.

“I was thinking about college gymnastics for a little while, but I think I’m ready to move on,” said Collins, who graduated from Los Alamitos High School in June. “There are other sports I’d like to get into. . . . I plan to play intramural volleyball.”

Talk about going out a winner.

This past season, Collins was floor champion, vault champion and all-around champion at the Southern Section finals. In the Empire League finals, she took first in floor competition and was runner-up in all-around.

“I just felt satisfied after CIF (Southern Section finals), but I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to continue in gymnastics,” she said. “I usually take a month off after the high school season ends. But then as I had the time off, I started to enjoy it.”

Collins began gymnastics at age 5, when her mother enrolled her in a tumbling class. She’s since moved from club to club, picking up techniques and tricks from different instructors.

“I didn’t really get good until a late age,” she said. “The last four years have been my best. I really improved a lot.”

During those four years, Collins competed in back-to-back gymnastics seasons--first with her club, New Hope, then for her high school--without a break. During the seasons, she averaged four-hour-a-day workouts for four days a week.

“I got home from school around 3 p.m., and I’d have to leave around 4 just to get there (New Hope’s gym in Fountain Valley).

“Then I’d get home around 9:30. That’s when I’d do my homework, so I was always up late.”

For a while she was able to keep up her hectic schedule, cramming in a couple hours of sleep each night so she could maintain a 3.0 grade-point average in her classes, which included honors courses.

“It caught up to me after a couple months. It got to the point where I would just do (homework) in class.”

Once high school competition began, Collins competed in about two or three meets a week during the two-month season.

“When I wasn’t competing, I was working out. Then the next day I would be competing again. I enjoyed it at the time, but sometimes it would get difficult because I couldn’t rest.

“If it wasn’t gymnastics, it was school. But the two balanced out.”

Collins wasn’t the only one at Los Alamitos High who burned out on gymnastics this past year. Sharon Flynn, who was Collins’ mentor at the school, put in 20 years as gymnastics coach there and said it was time to move on.

Only four Orange County high schools still have teams--and one of them isn’t Los Alamitos.

“The Los Alamitos program is nonexistent because of transportation and travel expenses,” Flynn said. “Parents would have to raise $8,000 for the program to continue.”

Flynn’s teams at Los Alamitos finished a combined 100-2, winning 18 of 19 league championships and Southern Section titles in 1981 and 1984. In 1985, CIF stopped sanctioning gymnastics team competitions because there weren’t enough schools fielding programs. So a new designation came into being, and the Los Alamitos teams were delared Southern California high school champions from 1986 through ’90.