Copyright 2003 The San Diego Union-Tribune

Aztec Gymnastics Lands on its Feet
By Lisa Petrillo
July 28, 2003

In an industrial zone near a strip club stands a sunny monument to innocence, angels and happy endings.

This is the new home of the once-closed Aztec Gymnastics school, which was for almost four decades the training ground of young champions until it fell victim to California's historic budget crisis.

True, Aztec Gymnastics' new and unfinished Kearny Mesa site is far from its cozy and traditional home at San Diego State University, whose mascot name the school still carries though it remains independent.

Last spring, the university became caught in a squeeze between needing more space to handle record-high enrollment and needing to make record-high budget cuts that limited classroom expansion.

That quandary shut down the last remnants of a once-proud gymnastics tradition at SDSU, ending the few remaining university-level gymnastics classes there, and 200 gymnasts in the community-based Aztecs program had to go elsewhere.

Last week a brigade of pony-tailed girls had started hitting the newer, bigger tumbling floor full of gravity-defying force.

"I like this place better because it's above ground so you can tell if it's day or night now," said Jennifer Gilbert, 16, who was one of the forces in the rebirth of the school from the old basement gym into a larger, window-filled warehouse off Clairemont Mesa Boulevard.

It was Jenni who innocently believed that surely the grown-ups at SDSU wouldn't throw them out if she just explained how important Aztec Gymnastics was to the growth of so many young people.

SDSU administrators did not see it her way. The university exists foremost, officials have said, for the university students.

Head coach Scott Ryan was one of 10 coaches out of a gym and a job after the eviction, but he landed on his feet with the reformed Aztecs, and he credits the parents with saving the 38-year-old program.

"These people would not take no for an answer," Ryan said.

Over the decades, he said, the gymnasts' parents ran the endless fund-raisers to pay for everything from leotards to $75,000 worth of mats, beams, bars, vaults and equipment that filled the campus's venerable Peterson Gym.

Parent Chuck Chaldekas, a former Navy SEAL now a military marksmanship consultant, said the key was to not let the parents sink into an emotional black hole. Instead, Chaldekas said, they focused on creating a bigger, private program that could be self-sufficient by offering cheerleading instruction and dance along with tumbling.

"We have no anger against San Diego State," said Chaldekas, a resident of Coronado. "What kind of examples would we be to our children if we carried this enmity with us and blamed everybody else for our problems, instead of finding the solution ourselves?"

It has been a hard-fought victory so far, said Sherry Gilbert, Jenni's mother.

"For a while Chuck was like the guy in 'Field of Dreams,' saying, 'Build it and they will come,' even when nobody but him believed it," Gilbert said.

Gilbert helped along the happy ending when, as a mother proud of her daughter's initiative, she sent The San Diego Union-Tribune copies of Jenni's passionate but unheeded letters to SDSU administrators.

A subsequent newspaper story about the demise of one of the oldest gymnastics programs in the county touched the heart of a stranger, retired physicist Chiushan Chen of La Jolla, the financial angel in the story.

"I wanted to help them. This is for the children," said Chen, who watched the girls work out this week in the gym he made possible.

The nonprofit Taiwanese-American Foundation, of which Chen is a member, donated up to $50,000 to help the nonprofit Aztec Gymnastics restart.

So Chaldekas, the focused ex-Navy man, said they haven't gotten over the rainbow yet, though he refuses to entertain any doubts they won't. He figures they have six months to make their program fly and keep this ending a happy one.

原始資料出處：San Diego State News Clip Service