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Life of a Gymnast Before I left for college, I was a gymnast for over eleven years. Over that period of time, I realized that gymnasts have a very different way of talking and going about things compared to most other people. The goal of this discourse community is to make friends, compete, and try to become the best gymnast we can be. The characteristics of being a gymnast are that we are all friendly, very competitive, and love to work hard. Gymnasts, unlike most other sports’ member’s, are very friendly. We love making new friend’s at competitions, which is one of our favorite parts of going to meets (competitions). Depending on how high of a level you are in, we get to meet other gymnasts from all over Arkansas and the United States. We don’t get to see these gymnasts much unless we are competing, so it is always fun to have the chance to meet back with them at every competition and talk about everything we have accomplished. We can’t really talk to anyone who isn’t a gymnast about all of the skills we have learned because they won’t know what we are talking about, so it’s great to be able to talk with people from our own discourse community who know exactly what we are talking about and can share our excitement with us. For anyone who has never been around gymnastics, it is basically impossible for them to understand exactly what we do. We have many different vocabulary words for the skills we do that if you have never been a gymnast, you wouldn’t understand. We have words like yager, front hand-spring front front, flip-flop layout, popa, giants, bail, and many more that we use to name the skills we are doing. I always get questions such as: “What is the best skill you can do?”. That question is the hardest to answer, because if I say a yurchenko, nobody knows what I am talking about. It is actually a skill on vault where I do a round-off onto the spring board, back-hand spring onto the vault, and a back pike off. One of the main characteristics of gymnasts, is that we are all hard workers. What I have noticed from being in the gym for over eleven years is that if a girl doesn’t ever work hard and always takes the easy way out and tries to cheat, she never makes it very far in gymnastics. You have to be honest, diligent, and most of all, willing. The skills we do can be very dangerous and sometimes even life-threathening. It is a sport that if you don’t just absolutely love it and aren’t willing to try hard skills, then you won’t make it very high up in levels due to the skills becoming too scary. Most gymnasts spend at least 20 hours in the gym a week. Along with that, we have to keep up with our grades. Because of this, we spend most of our time with our fellow gymnasts, therefore, they become our best friends. In gymnastics we are also taught to be the best we can be. One of our famous statements is “Go all out every time”, which simply means, do your best no matter what. To do our best at competitions, we have to give it all we have in practice every day. If we start to give up because we are tired, our coaches will encourage us to keep going. This helps a lot in life as well. If we have homework to do, but it seems impossible, we have grown up knowing how to fight through it to get it done. Gymnasts are also well disciplined. We obey our elders a lot more than most because we grew up having to obey our coach, and if we didn’t, we would be disciplined. Also, it takes a lot of energy to go to practice everyday after school until eight o’clock every night. We have to have enough willingness to do so if we want to be great at what we do. We also have to take a lot of time away from other activities we would like to do on weekends due to competition. Because of all of this, gymnasts are very respectful and disciplined. We have our own form of writing as well. This may be difficult to explain, but our writing is either making up a routine for bars, floor, or beam, or it is writing down our scores and calculating our all-round score after we compete. Every year we always have to make up a new routine for three out of the four events. These could get very confusing, so every gymnast would write down their routine as it was being made so we wouldn’t forget. Here I will give an example of one of my routines for bars: Kip, cast hand, clear-hip hand, bail, kip, squat on, jump to high bar, kip, cast hand, giant-giant, layout full. Another form of writing we would do, is to write down our scores at competitions and figure out what we would need to get on a certain event to have our ideal all-round score. We also would calculate our all-round when we were done with the competition and waiting for awards. It looks something like this: vault- 9.60, bars- 9.20, beam- 9.30; all of this adds up to be a 28.10, so what do I need on floor to have a 37.10 for my all-round score? 37.10-28.10 = 9.00. So I would need to get a 9.0 on floor to achieve my goal. I started gymnastics when I was five years old, but my mom took me out of it for two years when I was in 1st and 2nd grade because she said I wanted to quit, which I don’t remember. In 3rd grade however, she signed me back up and I was in it for good. I didn’t quit until I had to, when I came to UCA. When I was in gym, however, communicating with my fellow gymnasts was easy. We would always talk about how to improve our skills or what we can try to make our routine better. Friends in gymnastics are so important because being a gymnast is hard, and if you don’t have friends there to encourage you when you feel that it is becoming too hard, then most people would quit. So encouragment is a big part of the way we talk to each other. I got involved in this discourse community when I was very young, so I don’t remember why I joined. I stayed in it however because I loved the friendships I made, at my gym as well as at competitions, and because it was a challenge everyday. We all would strive to learn something new or improve a skill we had, which made is so interesting to me. I also loved competitions. I loved the adrenillin I would get just before I started my routine in front of the judges. I also loved being able to show off everything I had worked hard to learn. The girls I did gymnastics with are like my sisters, and my coaches are like my parents. Together we are all one big family. I still keep in touch with them by always getting together at my coaches house. I also go to the gym to coach when I am needed. We message each other on facebook as well, and when one of the girls gets a new skill, I always get a text message telling me about it. To keep updated with this discourse community, I also will read gymnastics magazines. When college gymnastics comes on T.V. I always watch this incredible sport and record it so I can watch it whenever I want, which is quite often. Gymnastics is a very different language that nobody would understand, unless you are a gymnast. We all have the same goals and characteristics, such as: we love making friends, competing, and striving to be the best gymnast we can be everyday we have the chance to. I wish I could still do gymnastcs now that I’m in college, but even though I’m not doing it anymore, I know that I’m still a part of that discourse community, and always will be. It is something that I will never forget.