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Tucked away in a corner of the College Park shopping center, a stone’s throw from the nation’s busiest airport, a dozen girls jumped off a small trampoline. The athletes at Airborne Gymnastics Club, a gymnastics studio owned by Camilla Norman and operated at this location since 2018, are ages 3, 4, and 5. The trampoline looked like a sandwich board on its side and the girls had fun jumping on it and jumping off it.
Camilla Norman, of Lansing; Michigan initially opened the gym as a mobile program in the spring of 2016 before finding a brick-and-mortar location large enough to accommodate a gymnastics studio. Not only did she want to teach the sport, she also wanted people to know that gymnastics can be enjoyed by anyone who wants to learn. She saw a need and filled it.
“We saw a need for more activities for the youth in this community,” Norman said. voice of atlanta One Wednesday afternoon in January. “I love the sport of gymnastics and am passionate about enriching lives through this amazing sport.
The need: According to data provided by the NCAA, only 10% of scholarship gymnasts identify as Black women. There are gymnasts who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through name, image, and likeness (NLI) funds that flood college athletics.
“Parents tell me all the time that their kids are jumping off everything in the house,” Norman says. “Gymnastics is a sport for everyone. It helps develop character, confidence, vitality and resilience.”
Norman, who was a former gymnast in her youth, added that gymnastics also develops agility, flexibility, strength, balance, coordination and what she calls a “sixth sense.”
Norman yelled at the students to “kneel, raise your arms and point your toes.” The girls, the youngest of whom was 3, followed instructions and made their way through stations set up around the gym floor. When the 5-year-old gymnast said, “I can’t,” Norman said, “Tackle, work. We don’t use those words here.”
When asked what he likes most about his job as a gymnastics coach, Norman, who is also known as “Coach K,” answered: “Seeing the smiles on their faces. Seeing how much they enjoy this and how they change from when they start to how far they go.”
“I take small steps every day to become the person I’m meant to be,” reads a sign on the gym’s mirrored wall.
Airborne Gymnastics Club USA’s travel and competitive teams compete across the country. One of the teams that competes at a high level, USA Gymnastics Level 2, won last year’s Flippy Hippie Invitational in Columbus, Georgia.
Norman says gymnastics is a great way for kids to have fun and build confidence. “Eventually, that’s what happens first,” said one of the little girls who was training that night, walking up to her mother, who was watching beside her, to discuss her hair. As I was about to go, she said with a laugh.
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