The Aorangi Gymnastics team travelled to Palmerston North this week to compete at the 2024 NZ Gymnastics Championships.
The competition began on Tuesday and will conclude on Saturday with all the different gymnastic codes competing over the course of the week.
The squad was selected from gymnasts who are competitive members for clubs from Timaru (South Canterbury GymSports and Timaru Gym Club), Waimate (Waimate Gym Club) and Oamaru (Pathfinders Gymnastics Club).
Aorangi have sent both an aerobic and women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG) team.
Aerobic gymnastics is the performance of complex and high-intensity movement patterns to music while WAG consists of vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercises.
"The aerobics team all come from South Canterbury GymSports (SCG) as it is the only club in the Aorangi region that offers aerobics.
"SCG is also the very proud club of all the WAG gymnasts representing Aorangi.
"Our step5 team members are all competing at nationals for the first time and are also the first team to compete for Aorangi since 2015, and possibly the first team for Aorangi to have all come from one club.
"It is also the first step7 for Aorangi since 2015."
Aerobics coach Talei Dickson said the team had a wide variety of experience.
"We’ve got a couple of new ones doing aerobics for the first time that have qualified but the biggest thing is apart from senior international we’ve got someone in every category.
"We have people who have done it for six years up to first years and this for them is the big event, the aim."
She said the goal for the team was to just do their absolute best.
"I don’t tend to focus on [results] because then that clouds the performances.
"The results comes from from them focusing on doing those things well so and then whatever the result is, it is what it is.
"If they’ve done really well and they’re happy with their performance and the result does or doesn’t reflect that then it’s out of their control."
WAG head coach Flaminio Oliveira said the WAG gymnasts were in a good place heading into nationals.
"We are focusing on whenever they come to the gym they don’t waste time, that they are busy doing whatever we need to do to prepare as best we can for the competition.
"We are doing quite well because on our first competition we qualified three or four girls.
"They have to qualify twice [for nationals] so on the second competition we already had most of them qualified.
"Then the other competition was just to to make sure they were doing the right things, checking their scores and improving as fast as we could to get them ready to go to nationals."
"They’ve been doing pretty well with their results this year, I’m really happy with how they’ve been progressing.
"The artistic season is longer so we’ve been to eight or nine comps this year already which has been good practice but for these step5 girls they’ve never been to a big competition like nationals.
"These girls have been training three times a week since May so for them to still be going strong is really quite impressive.
"I’ve been coaching a lot of them for the last four or five years so it’s quite exciting to able to go with them.
"I used to be an aerobics gymnast competing and now I get to go as their coach which I think is personally quite special."
WAG Representatives
Step5 team: Addyson Rogers, 13, Emily Best, 12, Georgia O’Sullivan, 15, and Ruby Mosen, 15.
Step7: Georgia Buckley, 14.
Aerobics Representatives
International Category: Annalise Evans, 15, and Georgia Buckley.
Levels Category: Casey-May Watt, 17, Paige Townshend, 15, Nicole Teixeira, 16, Helena Shelton, 16, Pypa Winter-Davis, 12, and Emily Jenkin, 14.
