Future Star A Second-Grader Highly Motivated Gymnast, 8, Points For 2002 Olympic Games
This is the face that gymnastics wants to project amid all the stories of anorexic youngsters, pushy parents and overbearing coaches:
Katie Bankieris, a vivacious 8-year-old who can’t wait to get to the gym every day.
“I like doing it because it’s fun and you get to compete against people and get ribbons and stuff,” said Katie, who’s missing a few front teeth like most children her age.
Unlike most second-graders, though, Katie is on the fast track to gymnastics success. Already the winner of state titles in the balance beam and bars, she has started competing in national meets and dreams of making the Olympic team in 2004.
“Where she goes in the future is up to her, how much effort she wants to put into it,” said Debby Young, coach at the Atlanta School of Gymnastics. “Obviously, she’s very talented and that’s why she works at it real hard. She’s a very focused child, which is just her personality trait.”
Young is tired of hearing the criticism about her sport, which is portrayed by its detractors as some form of child abuse. Katie’s schedule is demanding, to be sure, juggling school with four trips a week to a gym which is an hour’s drive from her home south of Atlanta. In all, gymnastics takes up 13 hours of her life every week.
“If you love something, is it effort?” Young asked. “I can hand you about 20 or 30 kids who’ll say, ‘I love it. This is fun.”’
Indeed, Katie seems to be enjoying herself as she bounces around the mat, her tiny body contorting into a series of back flips and cartwheels.
“When she was 3, I made her take dance and tap and ballet,” said Katie’s mother, Jan Bankieris. “I had to peel her off my leg every day to make her go. She kept telling me, ‘I want to do gymnastics. I want to do gymnastics.’ I told her to do dance for one year, but she hated it. She always wanted to be a gymnast.”
Katie began taking gymnastics classes while still in kindergarten - a necessity, according to Young.
“I think women’s gymnastics is a misnomer,” the coach said. “This is a child’s sport… . You want to get the majority of your skills before you hit puberty.”
Still, recognizing the trend toward gymnasts reaching world-class status as such an early age, the International Gymnastics Federation ruled that competitors will have to be at least 16 years old to compete in the Olympics and other world events after this summer’s Games in Atlanta.
But that doesn’t prevent long hours in the gym, something that worries child psychologists.
“The research strongly supports the importance of free play for children all the way up to age 10 or 11,” said Joanna White, an associate professor of counseling and psychological services at Georgia State University. “Free time is an essential building block for learning how to deal with other children, learning through trial and error, developing the imagination. I would encourage parents not to set up schedules where free time is taken away.”
Young insists that those skills can be learned within the confines of gymnastics.
“Our level 10 team (one step below the elite national level) is one of the most supportive group of kids you’d ever want to meet,” she said. “One kid’s father died last year and everyone else wanted to make sure she was OK. If there was anything she needed, they were there for her.
“Ninety percent of the kids you see here are A and B students,” Young continued, waving her arms toward the hundreds of children and teens working out below her. “They don’t get in trouble at school. They are not kids on drugs who do all the bad things you read about. But people don’t pick up on that part of it.
“These kids are driven to set goals for themselves and they learn how to reach those goals. They learn how to face fear. Those are things everyone goes through on a daily basis, yet here they get bad-mouthed about it.”
Bankieris said she isn’t trying to push her daughter to reach Olympic-level skills and she doesn’t mind if Katie decides to give up the sport when she gets older.
“I feel real strongly that as long as she’s having fun, this is what she’ll do,” the mother said. “When it becomes a stressful, pressure-type thing and it’s not what she wants to do, we’re out of it.”
The Olympics are not a focus at home, Bankieris added, other than a desire to land some of those hard-to-get tickets for the Atlanta Games.
“We’re in it now for the fun and whatever she can achieve now,” she said. “Whatever happens in eight years is going to happen in eight years.”
Schultz memorial
A memorial service will be held Feb. 11 for wrestler Dave Schultz, the 1984 Olympic champion who was murdered last week on the John du Pont estate in Newtown Square, Pa.
The 3 p.m. service will be held in Philadelphia on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Schultz family has requested that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to the David Schultz Family Endowment, in care of USA Wrestling, 6155 Lehman Dr., Colorado Springs, Colo., 80918.