Olympic Dreams : Interest in Gymnastics Increases With United States’ Atlanta Success

Elizabeth Porter, 6, is standing on the floor exercise mat at Kips Gymnastics in Anaheim and is refusing to comply with her teacher’s instructions.

“Call me Dominique Moceanu,” she says.

Her teacher, Bill Callander, grins.

“OK, you’re Dominique Moceanu. Go!”

Porter’s tiny legs suddenly fly into action and she bounds across the mat with a round-off, back handspring.

Then the rest of the class gets into the act and Callander plays along.

“Shannon Miller, go!” he yells. “Kerri Strug, you’re up!”

They dissolve into giggles.

For girls across the country, Miller, Strug, Moceanu and the rest of this summer’s U.S. Olympic women’s gymnastics team have become what Michael Jordan and Ken Griffey Jr. have been for years to boys in basketball and baseball--an inspiration.

Riding on their gold medal, girls’ gymnastics is enjoying a surge in popularity across the country this fall. Boys’ gymnastics also experienced a boost after the U.S. men’s team stayed in the hunt for the bronze during much of the Olympic men’s team competition before placing fifth.

Many club owners say the boon is the biggest since Mary Lou Retton inspired the last flood of children into the gym with her gold medal at the 1984 Olympics at Los Angeles.

“Enrollments are up. Kids are coming into the gym trying gymnastics for the first time or maybe renewing their interest in gymnastics,” said Luan Peszek, director of public relations for USA Gymnastics. “We’re getting a lot of calls from clubs and coaches and it seems like one of the biggest problems out there right now is having enough coaches to go around.”

Gyms typically enjoy a rush after each quadrennial and the degree of the frenzy is most affected by how well the United States fares. Dennis Mailly, owner of Kips Gymnastics in Anaheim and Corona, said the timing of the broadcasts as well as the media’s selection of stories also affect the post-Olympic honeymoon.

“Some Olympics are better than others,” he said.

In 1988 at Seoul, gymnastics did not occupy a large portion of the prime time broadcast, plus the United States women placed fourth. There was little increase in enrollment. In 1992, Miller’s five medals at Barcelona caused a slightly bigger rush to gyms.

This summer, however, interest flared as the U.S. women’s team was shown night after night in prime time.

“Once the Olympics hit we started getting phone calls and drop-in inquiries,” Callander said.

Mailly said the combined enrollment at his two facilities is up 30% from last year. Don Peters, former U.S. Olympic coach and owner of SCATS in Huntington Beach, reported a similar surge. Ron Manara, the owner of the Irvine School of Gymnastics, said his enrollment is up 50%. Enrollment also is up at the U.S. Gymnastics Training Center in Laguna Hills, which specializes in boys’ gymnastics.

Gym owners attribute the rise to kids such as Mariah Goldberg, 4, who talked incessantly about Moceanu after the Olympics.

“She asked if she could take gymnastics lessons, so, along with everything else, here she is,” said her father David Goldberg as he steered his little pink-and-yellow-clad daughter through a sea of tiny girls at Kips.

*

The vast majority of these pint-sized hopefuls will not persevere through the years of training it takes to reach the sport’s elite levels.

Jeanette Antolin, a freshman at Marina High, trains about 30 hours a week at Gym-Max in Costa Mesa. She recently placed fifth in the all-around at the USA Gymnastics junior national championships at Knoxville, Tenn.

Antolin’s older sister, Katie, also was an elite gymnast. The Antolin family moved from Paradise, Calif., to Huntington Beach in 1991 so the two girls could train at SCATS. Jeanette recently followed her coach, Jia Wen, to Gym Max.

Jeanette’s mother, Nola, estimates Jeanette’s training and leotards cost about $4,000 per year. The family also participates in gym fund-raisers to raise money for travel expenses, and USA Gymnastics will foot the bill when Jeanette travels with the U.S. junior national team to Wuhan City for the China Cup next month.

“Jeanette has a drive for this. She is a very, very dedicated, hard worker. You do not have to push her. She pushes herself,” Nola said.

Many of the 63,000 athletes participating in the sport nationwide will drop out before they get to high school, where gymnastics teams have become a rare species--there is no program for Antolin at Marina. Since 1982, the number of girls’ teams in the country has dropped 40% to 1,520 and the number of boys’ teams has dropped 70% to 175.

If the trend continues, by the time this latest wave of toddler tumblers gets ready to knock on high schools’ doors, there might be nothing there at all.

“The bottom line is money and qualified coaches. The concept of promoting it just isn’t going to make any difference,” said Susan True, assistant director of the National Federation of State High School Assns. “Right now we’re just trying to hold our own so if these younger kids, if they can’t be a Class 10 national gymnast, why the high school program is there for them.”

Peters said few parents expect that their toddler will become an elite gymnast.

“That’s not what they are looking for,” he said. “Parents are looking for a healthy fitness activity for their children.”

In the gyms, however, Olympic paraphernalia is omnipresent.

At SCATS, a huge United States flag adorns one wall in the spacious gym and pictures of former SCATS Olympians, such as Kathy Johnson, line the other walls. At Kips, many of the girls wear leotards decorated with red, white and blue stars and stripes and the letters “USA”.

Whitney and Haley Watson have been participating in gymnastics for several years. For them, this summer’s Olympics was not an introduction, but an affirmation of their activity.

“It made their friends appreciate what they are doing. Now when they say they do gymnastics, all their friends go, ‘Wow!’ ” said their mother, Wendy. “We taped every gymnastics event and so the girls have watched it about 10 times.”

The Olympics did not dissuade Haley, 6, from her dream of being an actress, but Whitney, 8, was enthralled with the competition. Whitney was mortified every time she saw a replay of Amy Chow hitting her face on the balance beam after a back flip during the U.S. Olympic trials at Boston in July.

“She was very sympathetic because beam was her hardest event. She covered her eyes every time they showed it,” Watson said. “That was the most poignant thing for her, seeing that they make mistakes.”

Three years ago, when Whitney began gymnastics, she was singled out immediately as a promising athlete and placed on a special, developmental squad.

“I don’t know if she’s going to go anywhere with it because it’s a huge commitment. A huge commitment,” Watson said.

Twice a week, after Whitney arrives home from school at 2:30, she rushes to complete her homework before practice at 5 p.m. In the car, Watson quizzes her daughter for any upcoming tests and she often doesn’t get home until 9 p.m.

“For an 8-year-old, that’s a lot of time,” Watson said.

But Mailly said it’s time well-spent.

“In my interpretation, [gymnastics] is a perfect teacher of life. It teaches children how to deal with adversity, set short-term goals, set long-term goals. If those goals aren’t met, having to back up reassess it and move forward again,” he said.

What’s more, there is something appealing to children about springing through the air.

Nancy Lundrigan is the mother of Kips gymnasts Kelsey, 7, and Alyssa, 8.

“Kelsey was a climber. She was just a little monkey. It seemed like she was climbing out of her skin with a need to climb things,” Lundrigan said.

Lundrigan enrolled Kelsey at Kips two years ago and she showed promise early.

“I feel like I’m going to encourage her, follow her lead, pushing but not really pushing,” Lundrigan said. “I wish I would have started her a couple years earlier.”

Although both girls already were involved in gymnastics, this summer’s Olympics boosted their enthusiasm.

“We watched every bit of it,” she said. “During the entire time they were very motivated to practice. They would do it in front of the TV and they both decided then and there that they were going to the Olympics some day.”

*

Leslie Kenfield, 28, began participating in gymnastics in 1972, after watching Olga Korbut win Olympic gold medals for the Soviet Union in the floor exercise and the beam at Munich.

Kenfield participated in gymnastics a total of 11 years and competed at an elite level for 7 before two back surgeries and two ankle surgeries finally forced her out.

During her days of elite competition, Kenfield experienced some abusive coaching--an issue for which gymnastics has been criticized in the past. In a fit of rage, one coach in Nebraska pushed over a beam on which Kenfield was practicing.

“Of course, we switched gyms after that,” she said.

Kenfield recently enrolled her daughter, Ashley Gonzales, 5, at Kips. Kenfield’s mother, Donna Kenfield, was initially aghast that Kenfield would sign up her daughter for a gymnastics class.

“My mom knew that [Ashley] would be really talented and really good at it and it just took so much of my life. She kind of regrets some of it, but I don’t,” Kenfield said.

Kenfield moved to Yorba Linda and competed with the dance team at Esperanza High before graduating in 1986. She owns California Dance Academy in Anaheim Hills along with her sister, Danielle Kenfield-Long.

Kenfield has tried to steer her daughter toward dance--”I don’t have to pay for dance classes,” she said--but Ashley has been enamored of gymnastics since the Olympics.

Every night after watching the Olympic gymnastics broadcast, Ashley would run into her room and try on all her different leotards, posing in front of the mirror and pretending she was Moceanu or Dominique Dawes.

“That was a nightmare trying to get her into bed,” Kenfield said.

Kenfield looked torn recently at Kips as she watched her daughter stare at a tumbling class.

“She would stay here forever,” Kenfield said with a sigh.

Not every child is so enthralled. One mother said she had difficulty convincing her 7-year-old daughter to wear a leotard to her first class, recently, because the girl was embarrassed about her weight.

Jill Koval Kahler, a former member of the U.S. women’s cycling team, enrolled her two daughters, Roxy, 6, and Raquel, 5, in gymnastics as a complement to their other fitness activities.

The girls also take ballet classes once a week and bike 25 miles on tandem bikes with their mother and father, Robert Kahler, each weekend.

“It seems like a lot of parents get [their children] into one thing and focus on it and they burn out, and I want them to be healthy for a lifetime,” Kahler said. “If they want to choose one [sport] when they get older, I would be happy to support that.”

While the motivation for many parents in writing the check for gymnastics each month may be simply teaching a child to put one foot in front of the other, few could deny that the determined grimace of a spindly girl in a USA leotard captured their imagination.

A dance teacher in Ohio wrote a letter to USA Gymnastics recently after she asked her class if they knew the name of the Olympic mascot.

There was a short silence and then one of the students answered shyly, “Shannon Miller?”