Younger gymnasts from Northern Gymnastics Academy with the championship trophy. Photos: Northern Gymnastics Academy.
Illawarra gymnasts have showcased their skills, dedication and creativity at the NSW Country Championships, with two local clubs crowned champions of their disciplines.
More than 1000 gymnasts from 37 clubs competed across seven gymnastic styles in front of crowds of hundreds, with the future of the sport on full display with emerging and established athletes vying for medals.
For Northern Gymnastics Academy, it marked the opportunity to prove the potential of the small club and the power of their program and teaching.
With the 96 students from the Bellambi studio shining across a range of levels, they were declared the 2025 Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Champion Club.
“I was so proud,” head coach Amy Muir said.
“We have a really great team, all the gymnasts, all the coaches; this is not a one-man job, this is everyone working hard together towards the same goal.”
The feat was made even more impressive by the fact that the award was calculated by the scores of levels five to 10, but the club didn’t compete in levels nine and 10.
But the level of success doesn’t come easily, with the gymnasts training up to 16 hours each week.
“Competitive gymnasts learn from a young age dedication, commitment and passion for something they love,” Amy said.
“They learn goal setting skills and the discipline and perseverance it takes to achieve those goals.
“They learn how to deal with disappointments and overcome challenges.
“They learn how to continue to work hard even when things get hard or they don’t get the desired results on the day of the competition, creating resilience and a mental strength that is unmatched.”
The club’s medal tally has been climbing, with its achievement at the Country Championships coming just weeks after winning the B League state championship in Sydney, to move into the A League next year.
As their athletes improve and they hope to find a larger space, the not for profit club could make an even bigger footprint in the competition circuit.
“We’ve built our club from the base up; we started from a foundational level and we’ve built a really strong team moving forward,” Amy said.
“And we definitely have plans to continue to expand into the higher levels as time goes on and as our really competitive kids move through.”
Despite their constant striving for success, these experiences ae about more than medals.
“I did competitive gymnastics when I was younger and most of my childhood key memories are the trips away that I had for gymnastics competitions,” Amy said.
“It’s just a really nice time for all the kids, the coaches and the families to spend time with each other outside of the gym.”
For Warrawong’s Gravity Gym, the competition also is an opportunity to highlight the enjoyment of smaller, lesser known styles of the sport, with the club walking away as the 2025 FreeG Champion Club.
“It felt honestly incredible,” coach Ethan Walsh said.
“We went into the competition not expecting too much because we had just had another competition, the boys were a bit tired and our training sessions had been a bit more relaxed so they didn’t get burnt out.
“Walking into the competition I said to them, ‘Just try out some new skills; try out some new combinations and see what you want to do.”
The discipline, which Ethan said was less restrictive than many other styles, is judged in two competition formats.
“The first one is a freestyle which the athletes have 10-minute warm-up to create their run where they do some vaults, which is getting over things using their hands; they’ve got flips, they’ve got transition elements and all other things like that, and they have to put it into a cohesive whole,” he said.
“The other version is a speed run where they need to get through a course as quickly as they can.”
He coaches a small competitive squad of seven gymnasts aged 10 to 17, with around 120 people in the gym’s FreeG recreational stream.
But the potential to get involved in the sport is possible for ages from 4 to 60 and beyond.
“I feel that FreeG is one of the easier gym sports to get into because there’s no requirements of ridiculous training hours or any particular style,” Ethan said.
“FreeG is you come in and you are taught the skills, and you put them together in a way that best suits you. It’s about freedom of expression and really how you want to set out your own.”
For the full results of the competition visit the Gymnastics NSW website.
To contact the clubs or get involved visit the Northern Gymnastics Academy Facebook page or Gravity Gym website.
