It's a Gymnast Thing #1

Most girls get excited over new clothes or shoes and wait for compliments on how cute they look, but guess what gymnasts get excited over…thats right, new leotards! When you get a new leo, you walk into the gym with the same feeling you have when walking into school with a new shirt. You say hi to all of your teammates, and just wait for them to notice. And of course, they notice right away. I mean, you only have so many leos, and your team is with you five days a week year round, so they are bound to notice. The very first thing they say to you is “Is that a new leo?!”, and you reply, “Yes!”, and they reply, “Oh I love it!”. So even though we get excited over new leos for practice, there is one leo that makes us stop in our tracks. It makes you nervous and excited at the same time. This leo, is the competition leo.

A new competition leo is something you get only every two or three years, so it is a pretty big deal. Just yesterday, we received our new competition leo. It was the end of gym, and we were stretching when Joy, who works at the front desk, walked into the gym holding a bag with a hanger. Even though the contents of the bag were hidden, we recognized the shape of it. Immediately, we jumped up. After waiting for about three months, it had finally arrived. 

New Competition Leo

Our coach reluctantly let us have a look; knowing she wouldn’t be able to control our excitement. We all gushed over the leo, and went to try it on. “Oh, it looks so good!” The eight of us crowded into the bathroom to admire the design in the mirror. Some of the new recreational coaches walked by giving us odd looks; they had never experienced the arrival of the competition leo before. After taking in every detail, we ran into the gym and did handstands and back-handsprings to test the quality of the material. Finally, when we were satisfied, we took them home in wait for our first competition.

A Week Full of Pranks

On Friday of this week, it was our coach Bryce’s birthday. Bryce has only been coaching at the gym for a few months, but the team already has plenty of inside jokes and humorous moments with Bryce. He is twenty-four years old, is in the National Guard, and is super buff. For his birthday present, we decided to fill his locker with a bunch of objects. If you saw his locker, you would think we just threw a bunch of random objects in there, but every single one of them had meaning. The biggest object was a homemade diagram that had trees with bow ties on them, a plastic smurf and a plastic tiger. It also had some grass and rocks to make it look like a jungle. So, what in the world do trees with bow ties, a smurf, and a plastic tiger have to do with gymnastics? Well, I guess it really doesn’t, but let me explain a little. This whole scene was based off of a phrase Bryce said about one of my teammates. “She is like a wild tiger in a civilized jungle.” Well, that is not weird at all. The trees with bow ties represent the “civilized jungle” and the tiger represents my teammate. Now the smurf. Whenever my teammates or I say something comical or bizarre, he doesn’t smile, he smirks. So for the smirk we put a smurf in the scene. I am not sure how we came up with a smurf for a smirk, but it works. We also put in a candle, hair gel, a stopwatch and some other objects. I will spare you the time of explaining all of these.

We did this prank on Monday, since this was the best day for everyone to be able to participate. This was going to be our only prank, but then some of the other coaches spread a rumor that we were going to pull a prank on him everyday this week. Of course we had to take the opportunity.

Day two was not as good of a prank because we did not have time to prepare, so we just wrapped his locker with pre-wrap (something gymnasts use under athletic tape for injuries, or for headbands). Day three was a glitter attack. This story comes from the day our team did the ice bucket challenge. All of us wanted to get Bryce wet, but we never did. But after practice was over, on the way out, one of my teammates, Patrisha, snuck up on Bryce and covered him with glitter. So this prank was a re-creation of that moment. Our head coach Katy asked him to get something out of her car, so we hid outside by the door and as soon as he walked out, we threw glitter all over him. For the rest of the day, we kept finding paths of glitter throughout the gym, and Bryce had glitter all over him. The next day he came in he still had glitter behind his ears literally.

Prank number four was the best prank. When gym was over, Katy took Bryce to Maxwells with some other coaches for a birthday dinner. While they were gone, we decorated Bryce’s car with car paint. On the windows we wrote things like “just married” and “baby on board” and “off to Paris”. Remember, Bryce is twenty-four, in the National Guard, and super buff, so to have this written on his car is hysterical. We had some issues with this prank. Bryce must have heard about it, so he hid his car from us. We spent thirty minutes running around trying to find his car.

Just one window of his car.

The last prank was on Friday, Bryce’s actual birthday. At the end of practice, we brought out a cake for Bryce. But he couldn’t cut the cake, so we jokingly made fun of him by saying “are you not strong enough Bryce?” Finally we told him that the cake was a block of ice with frosting on top. Then we brought out real cupcakes for everyone to enjoy.

This week of pranks was very successful, but now we need to make sure we live up to the same standards next year!