Two Okotoks Airborne Tumbling and Trampoline athletes have landed at nationals after their performance at the club’s meet on the weekend.
Airborne head coach Matt Wheele said it was a terrific weekend top-to-bottom for the local club.
“Performance wise everybody from Airborne had at least two good events,” Wheele said.
“This is the first competition for the provincial athletes so a lot of them just because they completed routines are now qualified to go compete at provincial championships. Nationally, it was a really good competition and the boys are looking forward to upping their difficulty and doing some newer skills.”
Layne Bell, 20, qualified for the 2012 Canadian gymnastics championships, May 21-26 in Regina, in both the double mini-trampoline and tumbling divisions.
“My goal coming in was to complete routines on trampoline, I’ve been having a little bit of inconsistency issues with it this year, and also to complete all my other passes which I did. So I’m pretty happy,” Bell said.
The third-year Airborne athlete said it wasn’t his best weekend of performances, but he made important technical improvements.
“I got better lifts on my mini (trampoline) and my tumbling is a lot more powerful, a lot faster,” Bell said.
National competition is old hat for the Calgary native whose already made it that far on nine occasions, but will be making his third appearance wearing the Airborne team colours.
Connor Richardson will be joining Bell in Regina as the 18-year-old qualified in the double-mini trampoline and trampoline events. Richardson said a conservative approach to his routine led to the successful run.
“I definitely took down the degree of difficulty a little bit, I need to start getting more consistent in competitions as far as completions go,” he said. “Coach (Wheele) and I talked and we took down the routines a little bit and it went really well.”
Wheele said the safe approach with Richardson was based on a disastrous routine from the 18-year-old at an trial event in November.
Richardson needed a score of 84.6 to qualify for the national meet in Regina and beat the standard by a considerable margin, earning a score of 85.8 in his Feb. 4 routine.
The Calgary resident will be making his fourth appearance at the national championships. Richardson made it as far as the Pan American Games in 2010, but said he’s eager to earn a spot at the Indo-Pacific Games and berths are on the line at the Regina nationals.
“I’ve just really decided to start training hard as of late, I’m done with school and I just had better commitment and it’s going to be better results too,” he said. “It’s like they say it’s not the hours you put into the work, it’s the work you put into the hours.”
At the provincial level, Wheele said three Airborne tumblers were participating in their first event in the sport and all acquainted themselves admirably. Okotoks resident Nicole Tailby was one of the newcomers and walked away with a gold and silver medal in her tumbling and trampoline debut.
Wheele was pleased with the showing by his athletes, but also expressed satisfaction with the success of the meet from an organizational standpoint.
“We put over 170 athletes through three events this weekend and I bet you we had 400 or 500 spectators come through,” Wheele said. “It was probably one of the bigger meets Airborne has hosted, everything went really well... we set the bar for the rest of the competition hosts to do as good of a job as us.”
