Olympic-sized talent pool

The Glendale YMCA Gymnastics program has been developing talented young athletes for more than two decades, but never has it sent students to the Junior Olympics — the highest-level competition for young gymnasts — until now.

Today, 19-year-old rings specialist Michael Partizpanyan will travel to the Men’s Junior Olympics in Battle Creek, Michigan, to compete for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team.

And in June, three local girls will head to Hillard, Ohio, for the Rhythmic Junior Olympics.

All four athletes had to place first, second or third in recent regional competitions to qualify for the upcoming competitions — and the fact that they did has Arpi Avetyan, director of the Glendale YMCA gymnastics program, exhilarated.

“It’s huge, huge, huge for us,” said Avetyan who was named director of the program after working solely as a coach for eight years. “To get there, it’s really hard. It’s really big.”

But if anyone involved is more excited than Avetyan, it’s her students, especially the girls, who range from 9 to 11 years old and have embraced their sport to the point where, collectively, they spend about 65 hours per week in the gym.

All three girls specialize in rhythmic gymnastics, a ballet-like, choreographed floor routine in which the athlete maneuvers an “apparatus,” like a ribbon, ball or rope, with their hands.

At a recent afternoon practice Amanda Kurtyan, 9, pranced across the gym floor, twirling a pink ribbon as she spun pirouettes on her toes.

“The trick is to move your wrist really fast so you don’t let the ribbon touch the ground,” Amanda said. “The judges hate that.”

Seconds later, Erica Der Mesropian, 11, tossed a volleyball-sized orb about 15 feet into the air, executed a crisp somersault and landed in a split just in time to cradle the falling ball in her elbows.

Just as Erica caught the ball, Natalie Bazikyan, 9, sprinted across the gym floor, launching into a mid-air split, then swinging a short jump-rope under her legs twice before landing.

“That’s the tough part,” Natalie said.

Their routines may be tough, but parents say the girls want nothing more than to be in the gym as often as possible.

“She pushes me — I don’t push her,” Dominic Kurtyan said of his daughter, Amanda.

But Kurtyan is more than supportive of his daughter’s enthusiasm for the sport and for the Glendale YMCA program, which he said has instilled in her a healthy competitiveness and helped her fine-tune skills to make impressive art.

“As a parent, to watch my daughter on the floor flow freely and gracefully, it makes me want to cry,” Kurtyan said. “Because it’s beautiful.”

Partizpanyan has trained at the Glendale YMCA for 13 years and says he was drawn to the rings by the upper-body strength required by the routines. When the teenager practices, holding himself in the air for moments of rigid suspense, then catapulting himself upward before flipping to the floor, every set of eyes in the gym looks his way.

“The person who’s the champ of the rings, that means he’s the strongest,” Partizpanyan said.

Partizpanyan said he never set out to pursue a spot on the Olympic team, but now that it’s in striking distance, it’s become a real goal, he said.

“When you see that possibility, you start aiming for it,” he said.