Karly's life as a gymnast

Balance, tumble, twirl...these are all skills senior gymnast Karly Harrell works on each day to better hone her talent.

Aurora High School has a gymnastics team, but Harrell decided to pursue the sport outside of school. Harrell not only does gymnastics, she also coaches.

Harrell stated that she does not participate in the school team: “Mainly because my job is coaching gymnastics, so after work I can just stay and practice there. Also in part because our school gymnastics team has to travel to West G in order to practice and it’s out of the way for me.”

Harrell started gymnastics when she was three years old, and since then she has won several medals and trophies throughout the year.

Before Harrall started high school, she would practice every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday for three and a half hours.

Now Harrell coaches every day, and by doing that only allows her to practice for a little bit. However since she started coaching, she decided to stop competing and do gymnastics for fun.

Before Harrell deciding to coach, her best event was the balance beam; and her best skill was her back handspring step out.

Being a gymnast is hard physically and mentally for a person, and Harrell informed me of what it takes to be a gymnast. “Preparation and trust is what gets me not only mentally but physically ready for a skill. Most of the time before doing a certain skill there are drills leading up to it that prepare me to be able to be more successful when going for it. Trusting my coaches also helped me to go for more difficult skills because if they said I could do it then most likely I could.”

When I asked Harrell if she would agree that most people can’t do gymnastics, she stated, “Uh sorta yes. It has to do with the fact that I started gymnastics so young in life and built the foundation and just worked from there to be where I am now. Gymnastics is not really the sport you can just decide to do one day when your twenty, like basketball. Although there have been times when an older person can do gymnastics, it’s just not likely.”

As can be seen, gymnastics involves a lot of mental and physical straining for a person and you have to trust your teammates and coaches. And unlike any other sport out there, gymnastics is difficult to just randomly start. Gymnastics requires a lot of foundation and work to become a good gymnast; thus requiring you to start at a young age.