Dreams Do Come True

It started with four gymnasts and a beginners class in a tight-for-space area, but now the vision of Chuck Jambliter and Tom Anderson has become a reality.

“It was actually a 10-year dream,” said Anderson, director of the Lakewood Family YMCA, of the 10,000-square-foot gymnastics center that stretches behind the facility.

From the time the gymnastics program started, it grew too large for the very area it occupied there until there was never enough space to get things done.

When Jambliter, the program’s director, came to the Lakewood YMCA from the Jamestown YMCA, the indoor soccer field they were given to use seemed more than enough to satisfy the requirements of the gymnasts. However, with a program that has grown to more than 180 participants per week, there wasn’t time to compete with the YMCA’s soccer schedules.

“When we got out here, they gave us more space on the soccer field so thought we had it made, but then again it just grew larger and larger, and we were taking more and more space out there,” Anderson said.

With the help of local foundations, parents, and people supportive of the YMCA and the program, Anderson and Jambliter began drawing out a three-year plan to build a gymnastics area that would eliminate the time and space problems they had been burdened by for nearly 10 years.

“I think realistically it was a good three-year plan where we actually sat down and drew up plans,” Anderson said. “We set everything up and then had to go out and raise the money”.

Then in November of 1998, Anderson and Jambliter saw their dream spring to reality as Frewsburg’s C&R Construction poured the first cement towards the foundation of a gymnastics center.

”Sealing the floor, I think they did that on New Year’s Eve,”said Jambliter. “Once that was done, we started moving the stuff in.”

Then just after the first of the year, the gymnasts began practicing in the facility, that after 10 years of dreaming, was finally complete.

“It’s a state-of-the-art facility,” Jambliter said of the 10,000 square foot building and the product of three years of planning.

Now all of the equipment the gymnasts use at the Lakewood YMCA is top-of-the-line, including a 40-foot by 40-foot spring floor with 2100 springs in it, a six-foot deep training pit that will break almost any fall, a brand new tumbling strip, new sets of bars and beams, a floor trampoline and more.

“What you see in the Olympics is basically what we have here,” Jambliter says of the spring floor. “Our equipment is the same stuff as they use at the world championships – its top of the line”.

Jambliter and Anderson don’t see any problem with space or time schedules in the future because now they can extend the center’s hours as needed.

“When we were in the other gym (soccer field), besides the lack of space, we also had soccer”, Jambliter said of the time conflicts before the center was built. “Indoor soccer is big. Every night there’s three straight hours of little kids playing soccer. Every day we had to be done at 6:30 (p.m.).”

Now Jambliter has time to schedule things at 7 and 8 o’clock at night. He has cheerleaders come in sometimes, retired gymnasts other times.

“It has expanded the hours.” Jambliter says. “We have Saturday classes that are going to start in a couple of weeks which before we never could do because soccer was all day. That’s the nicest thing and we haven’t even gotten into a boys program at all.”

Perhaps one of the best qualities of the new facility is not having to set up and tear down the equipment night in and night out.

“That was the biggest thing,” Jambliter said. “It wasn’t so much the time we had to spend doing it. We just couldn’t have three sets of bars set up. We didn’t have room and we didn’t have time to set them up”

He added, “A spring floor was out of the question. That’s probably an hour and half, two hours just to put that up and take it down. We had a trampoline but it wasn’t a floor tramp so I had to have four spotters, five spotters over there all the time. The biggest thing is not the time. It’s the fact that we can have everything set up all the time.”

Every day Randi Smith wakes up in the morning and drives to Randolph Central School where she spends about six or seven hours tackling the grueling work a high school senior is faced with on a daily basis.

Then if that isn’t enough, when school is out, Smith hops into her car and drives about 20 miles to the Lakewood Family YMCA where she spends hours brushing up on her gymnastics skills only to drive 20 miles back at the end of the night.

But for Smith, this is the norm. This is what she does and this is what she loves.

It’s like this for many of the 180 girls who are in and out of the gymnastics center every week. Some of the girls are there once or twice a week while others, such as Smith, spend every day in the trenches of the gymnastics world.

It’s not a sport such as high school football or summer league soccer that lasts for months and then is over. Some of these girls are here 50 or 51 weeks out of the year. Maybe taking two weeks off in the summer.

Smith has been involved in gymnastics for nine years and the involvement hasn’t just meant a lot of her time, it’s meant her parents time as well.

Smith’s parents were the ones who drove the 40-miles a day before she got her license, but Smith says her parents enjoy her involvement in the sport and the traveling that goes along with it.

“They love to travel and do all that kind of stuff,“ Smith said of her parents. “They’re good about it, they’ve been good about it for nine years.”

Jambitter added, “We talk about giving the kids the experience, but it’s also an experience for the kids to go with their parents. It’s almost like half vacation, half gymnastics.”

The competitors travel to competitions all over the country. From meets in Rochester and Batavia to the New York State Championships in Flushing to the national championships in Savannah Ga., or even trips to San Diego. One year, in fact, members of the team went to Budapest, Hungary.
And for the most part, the parents travel with the kids to wherever the gymnastics world takes them. It is the parents who along with fundraising, pay for the travel expenses and make the gymnastics program tick day after day.

“It’s a commitment for the kids and for the parents to a certain extent.” Jambliter said.

But for each of the girls, as for the parents, it’s rewarding. For example, Brittany Gullotti, who has been a gymnast since she was 3, says gymnastics gives her a sense of fulfillment.

“I get a lot of confidence for myself by going to meets and being in front of a lot of people,” she said. “Before meets I get really nervous, but I know I can do it.”

Gullotti says that although she doesn’t get as much sleep as she would like sometimes, she wouldn’t want to do anything else.

“Sometimes I'm up to like 11 o’clock,” she said, “but I’d rather come to gymnastics than do anything.”

Gymnastics isn’t always easy for the girls. It is a sport that involves time, hard work and patience.

“They’re very motivated,” Jambliter says. “They work very hard. Some sports, you can screw around – basketball, soccer. But gymnastics is not a sport to screw around in.”

“Because there is so much strength involved, if you miss a month it hurts. If you don’t play basketball for a month, you may be in a little bit in less good shape, but you can get by, whereas these girls, it’s amazing the strength they have.”

“To actually be competitive,” Jambliter says, “it usually takes a couple of years, but it’s because they have to, at least somewhat, master four events. If all I had to do was teach them floor, the time would be a lot less.”

Along with floor, the gymnasts also master the vault, the balance beam and the uneven bars.
The gymnasts are put into classes. There are 10 levels, 10 being for the most advanced gymnasts, with level 1 being for beginners. Level 4 gymnasts are the level that compete.

The Lakewood YMCA has the largest gymnastics team of all YMCA branches with girls from the ages of 8 to 18 competing from December to March.

In 10 years. Anderson and Jambliter have taken a gymnastics program from 4 girls and 12 beginners to a 180 participant program.

The pair went from a small area to a soccer field to a 10,000 square foot building built especially for gymnastics.

Now that the program doesn’t have to face the problems of space and time, the gymnastics center is considering on Saturdays while the possibility of a boys program may not be too far away.