Emily ’09 walks into her gymnastic tournament, prepared.
She stands with her team in the center of the mat as she places her right hand over her heart. Oh say can you ... Her heart palpitates. Rocket’s red glare ... Butterflies flutter in her stomach. Our flag was ... She pictures herself landing perfectly, two feet on the ground. And home of the brave ... The song ends, her imaginary routine is over.
She walks onto the floor, nods to the judges, then propels herself into the air and runs in with a round-off back handspring, kicks the ground for a full twist, flips backwards, and lands, two feet on the ground.
“Gymnastics is emotionally and physically training, and it’s stressful when you get closer to season (which starts in January,) but I feel like I’m in shape,” Emily said.
Glory doesn’t come easy, Emily said. Competing six times a year, Emily has been practicing routines for ten years. Currently, she practices at the Josephson Academy of Gymnastics (JAG) from five to nine p.m. from Monday to Friday, performing routines on the vault, floor, beam, and the uneven parallel bars.
“You’re tired,” Emily said. “You want to go home and get done with the rest of your homework, go to sleep and relax, but you can’t. But then, you think for college and for yourself.”
For Emily, it’s no pain, no gain. Falling off the balance beam, having tendonitis, and receiving her shock treatment for shin splits, Emily has experienced several accidents.
“Oh yeah. I’ve split the beam many times,” Emily said, using colloquial slang. “All gymnasts get used to the fear of hurting themselves because they adapt to their feelings, and it becomes natural.”
Emily’s coach, James Foody, who has been coaching Emily for three years, echoes Emily’s sentiments and says she is a hard worker.
“Emily is a physically talented athlete on the floor, vault and beam. She has a ton of leg strength,” Foody said.
Foody also noticed that Emily is sometimes overly self-critical and a bit hard on herself.
“But I’ve never met anyone who was successful and wasn’t hard on herself,” Foody said.
Last December, JAG director Anne Josephson encouraged Emily to send tapes to the judges of The Pan-American Maccabi Games, a mini-Olympics for Jewish athletes. She was accepted.Traveling to Buenas Aires. Emily met young athletes from around the world.
“I exchanged my USA jacket for a Brazilian jacket, red Maccabi basketball shorts for Columbian shorts, and USA pins for Venezuelan and Argentinean pins,” she said.
Emily and her team finished first in Argentina, and she herself won gold on the balance beam and silver on the vault.
In her last year of high school competition, Emily says she hopes to finish off “with a bang” and transfer her refined skills from practice to competition.
“It gets really hard to motivate yourself, but I do gymnastics because it helps me learn to gain more confidence in myself,” Emily said.
