Photo from urigymnastics.weebly.com.
“I think the biggest thing with club was that we were all there because we wanted to be there,” Emma Mangione said of the University Rhode Island club gymnastics team. “We were all there because we loved gymnastics.”
Mangione was the club’s president and one of eight senior gymnasts from the class of 2020 whose final season was cut short last March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her career ended as abruptly as possible, but this year’s team is doing their best to avoid the same fate.
Sixteen is widely considered the age a gymnast peaks and if your career doesn’t end before college, then college is also widely seen as the last stop before retirement. For athletes playing other club sports, college being the last time they compete in their sport isn’t much of a surprise.
For gymnastics, it represents something different.
Senior and co-captain Kennedy Stovall noted that the older you get, the harder it is for your body to perform the skills required for gymnastics competitions. The crux for gymnasts is that it’s also a sport that revolves around competing, so when that ends, so do you.
“When you stop, you know you’re stopping. And that’s it. And you’re okay with that,” Mangione said. “But for gymnastics, especially, it’s been a part of your life, your whole entire life. So it’s not just a college sport you’re losing or a high school thing. For a lot of us, it’s a part of us, like, who we are.”
While a former soccer player may be able to play in a game of pickup with their friends or a retired basketball player may still shoot hoops every once in a while, gymnastics is not a sport you can just pick up and put down.
After last season’s abrupt end, senior and current club president and co-captain Abigail Reigner was unable to train in a gym from March to July. In what may seem like just a few short months, it greatly impacted her ability to do her sport.
“Usually if you take [just] a week off, you lose skills and it’s hard to get back,” Reigner said.
Even then, she was only going into her local home gym once or twice a week due to COVID-19 guidelines. When the club team got the go-ahead to start practicing again last semester, the team of about 20 girls had to split up into pods of five to practice in.
“Team bonding was very difficult; we weren’t really able to intermingle,” Reigner said. “We had the same group of people that you are constantly training lists and some days motivation was definitely lacking.”
While there’s nothing on the season schedule yet, the team is looking into hosting other teams virtually without spectators and livestreaming them to audiences.
Going into this season, Stovall made sure to keep her expectations low in order to avoid disappointment, and just being able to train with girls on the team has allowed for her to appreciate her last semester on the team.
“Anything that we can do just to have some sort of season is better than [nothing],” Stovall said. “So we are trying to have a positive outlook on it and I feel like we’re just hoping for the best.”
Part of that hope is to be able to end their time at URI and their gymnastics careers with some kind of a senior meet, another thing last year’s seniors missed out on. Mangione said some of her teammates were looking forward to the team’s final meet at home more so than nationals.
All three gymnasts stressed the close bond of the team and the family that they were able to create during their time as part of the URI club gymnastics team. They all know that whether they get to compete again or not, they’re leaving with great memories and friendships for life. Reigner even said that if she had never gotten the chance to train or compete again after last March, she would have been satisfied because of the great time she’s had within the program.
They still have this semester and a chance to compete though, no matter what it may look like.
“Whatever it is, it means a lot to me because I feel like I’m doing it not just for myself, but for all my teammates who didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to the sport they love the way they wished,” Reigner said.