By Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
Managing Editor
It’s a “sissy” sport. It’s for girls. Guys doing gymnastics is like guys being a cheerleader- it’s just not what guys do.
The boys’ gymnastics team has heard it all before. They get no respect for participating in a sport that forces them to push themselves to the brink of what their bodies can physically handle.
This has proved so apparent at South that a total of four Newton South athletes signed up for a team that won the Massachusetts State Championship. Senior captain Tomer Keren, senior Miles Welbourn, sophomore Ido Tamir, and freshman Adam Iskandar make up the entirety of males from South who happen to be the best gymnastics team in the state.
They were forced to combine with the boys’ gymnastics team at Newton North that boasts the state champion in the all-around event, a level ten junior gymnast named Jonathan Wang. Wang led the Newton combined team to its first state championship, yet many of the athletes from South are not satisfied.
“If I want anything it’s actually for the teams to split and expand the sport just for South,” Welbourn said. “It’s difficult to get people to do gymnastics just because of the stigma that it’s a ‘sissy’ sport.”
At Newton North, which has its own gymnastics practice facility, there are nine gymnasts on the combined team. At a usual practice, after the members from South find their way across town by driving themselves, they start practice just like every other team, by stretching and warming up.
The gymnasts then practice skills for events like floor, pommel horse, still rings, parallel bars, high bar and vault-events that those who have never practiced gymnastics have no idea what they consist of. But, according to Keren, anyone can at least try any event, even if they have never done gymnastics before.
“We had five members that did parkour [before doing gymnastics]. It was hard to get the kids that do parkour to look like gymnasts, but putting in the practice paid off,” Keren said. “Many people give up the idea of flipping and doing some of these amazing skills before they even try to learn them. If we had more people at least trying, South would be able to have its own team.”
“It’s a sport that’s really tough mentally,” Tamir said. “I mean the things that we have to learn are scary at first but we get ourselves to do them anyway.”
Before the state championship, there was some doubt on the team about if they would be able to accomplish their goal due to injuries to key gymnasts like Keren, while also fighting through a lack of practice time due to the multiple snowstorms, challenges that every team at South had to face.
“The stars seemed to align, we were at home, it was our seniors’ last chance, it didn’t look like we were going to win with the injuries, but we ended up winning which made it mean so much more,” Tamir said. “It was like something out of a movie.”
With Wang taking first place in his event, Welbourne taking sixth place in his event, among others, the combined Newton team beat out five other teams to become the state champs.
That’s right, in the entire state of Massachusetts, there were five male gymnastics teams in the state championship. The MIAA even stopped recognizing it as a sport briefly, in 2013, which took everyone by surprise. But that did not stop these athletes from competing.
“Not many people see how much strength is needed for gymnastics and how hard the sport is,” Keren said. “All of us put in our very best every practice and the hours of conditioning, stretching and repetitions really pay off.”
It’s hard to pinpoint how or why this sport earned, or rather got stuck with this label, but it is clear that the label has stuck with the sport. Was it the tight leotards that they used to wear in the past?
“We’ve replaced the leotards with tanks,” Welbourn said, hinting that the change was an attempt to help change the perception of the sport.
Men’s gymnastics is an olympic sport that few watch and even less have heard of. Most students at South have no idea that there even is a gymnastics team for male athletes, let alone know that it boasts a team that accomplished their ultimate goal: to win a state championship.
The team has decided that not only will it continue to recruit students at South to come out for the team, but also will venture to middle schools to show the next high schoolers that this sport deserves the same amount of respect as each and every sport in high school; it’s a sport in which athletes should be proud to compete.
“We are going to raise the awareness about what we do and how hard it is,” Keren said. “We will go to middle schools and show them some flips and hopefully they will get excited about the sport.”
“It felt amazing [to win states]. It felt impossible to keep our composure between the time they announced second place and the time they announced us as the champions,” Tamir said. “Some of my teammates couldn’t stop themselves from jumping.”
The excitement was palpable. The satisfaction was well deserved. The student recognition was not sufficient for a state champion. The stigma is a prejudice that has no basis, that still cannot be overcome.
“It’s an excellent team environment, gets you really fit. We are looking for people no matter their skill level,” Welbourn said. “Join up, gents.”
Note: Welbourn changed from Welbourne
