For the last six years, the Buffalo Grove Gymnastics Center has been taking athletes with the combination of raw talent and desire and turning them into winners. In the process, the center has built a reputation as one of the top facilities in the country for male gymnasts.
Although coaches at the center work with students at a variety of skill levels, it is the elite like 16-year-old Kris Zimmerman of Winnetka who flower under what can be an intense regimen.
Zimmerman, who will be a junior at New Trier High School in Winnetka this year, goes to the gymnastics center six days a week year-round, working on his gymnastics routines in a gym filled with competition equipment, an in-ground trampoline and two foam pits that young gymnasts use to develop landing skills.
During the school year, he’ll be there Monday through Thursday nights and on Saturdays and Sundays. Even during the summer, Zimmerman practices from about 1 to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday. He practices an average of 20 hours a week.
“It’s a good place to work out,” he explained. “There are a lot of other good gymnasts and good coaches. All the coaches have something different to add, and that gives me a different perspective on my skills. And I go there so much because I want to become good.”
By training at Buffalo Grove for so long and with such talented coaches, Zimmerman has honed his talents to become a budding Olympian. He will again test his skills against top gymnasts this week when he goes to Denver for the John Hancock USA Gymnastics Championships. His club teammate Kevin Agnew, 18, of Winnetka also will compete at that meet, Wednesday through Friday.
But Zimmerman and Agnew are just a few of the success stories to emerge from the Buffalo Grove Gymnastics Center. Since its opening in 1991, it has produced a number of nationally ranked gymnasts. In addition to Zimmerman and Agnew, three of the center’s former gymnasts–Jim Foody of Addison, Jeremy Hoders of Deerfield and Adraine Johnson of Winnetka–have competed successfully in national events.
The center serves about 2,300 boys and girls, with programs for children as young as 6 months old through high school age. (A second facility is scheduled to open in Bartlett on Aug. 25.) The athletes are coached by a staff of 25 full-time coaches, led by co-owner and coach Kelly Crumley, a Long Grove resident who has been on the USA Gymnastics junior national coaching staff since 1986.
“It is one of the top 10 boys clubs in the country,” Dennis McIntyre, the men’s program manager for USA Gymnastics, said of the Buffalo Grove Gymnastics Center. USA Gymnastics, which acts as the sport’s national governing body, has 511 member clubs.
“One way I like to judge programs is by longevity,” McIntyre said. “Are they able to place boys nationally year after year? Buffalo Grove Gymnastics does, and that puts them in select company.”
The success of the boys program, according to those familiar with the center, is built on factors that have a spiraling effect. There is a talented coaching staff that has the time to work closely with gymnasts, which results in those athletes improving so much that they can be very competitive against higher level gymnasts. As a result, talented gymnasts choose the club so they can practice with the best of their peers, knowing that such good athletes will help each other become better and will push each other to work harder.
When young gymnasts look for a place to learn, the Buffalo Grove Gymnastics Center becomes “a magnet” because of its talented coaches and gymnasts, said SportsChannel gymnastics analyst Robby Brown, who also operates Excel Gymnastics in Aurora.
“People will come train with Kelly because they recognize that the club has made a commitment to a high level of gymnastics,” said Brown, a U.S. National Team member from 1985 to 1987. “Other (Chicago area) gyms are financially successful, but they can’t or won’t make the commitment to the high level of gymnastics that Kelly is doing.”
Much of the center’s success starts with the 37-year-old Crumley. He finished in the top 10 in high bar at the NCAA men’s championship in 1982 and that year was also a finalist for the Nissen Award, given to the top senior college gymnast. (Co-owner Gregg Didech of Barrington runs the business side of the center.)
“(Kelly) has taught me everything I know about gymnastics,” Zimmerman said. Crumley said Zimmerman has a “very realistic” shot at making the Olympic team, either in 2000 or 2004.
“It is very easy to say, `I want to be on the Olympic team,’ but Kris truly has that ability,” Crumley said.
Growing up in Addison, Crumley began in gymnastics when he was 2, following in the footsteps of his father, Claude, who entered national gymnastics competitions in the 1930s. Kelly Crumley was on the Addison Trail High School gymnastics team and then went on to make the men’s teams at the University of Oregon and the University of Iowa.
After coaching the boys program at the Northbrook Gymnastics Training Center from 1986 until 1991, Crumley decided to start his own center because he wanted the chance to work on developing top-level gymnasts. The Buffalo Grove site was selected because it was centrally located.
In recent years, with gymnastics being a sport perceived by some as having coaches and parents who push children too hard to train, Crumley says gymnasts must motivate themselves.
“I don’t push training too hard,” he explained. “There is no sense in pushing a kid who doesn’t want to do something. To be an Olympian, that is a hard push (in terms of training) and for a long time. So I try to develop their desire. By the time they are older and mature, they will make their own decision of whether they want to work that hard.”
Crumley’s wife, Teri, who was a gymnast with him at Addison Trail as well as in Oregon and Iowa, runs the girls program at Buffalo Grove. Their children, son Chad, 7, and daughter Taylor, 2, both participate in gymnastics at the club.
The Buffalo Grove center runs instruction programs year-round, with its primary goal to unite a child’s love for fun with gymnastics lessons, Crumley said.
“It is a natural thing for children to want to play in a playground, and this is a playground environment,” he said. “But we take it one step farther, in that it is organized and that the kids actually learn how to play in a way.
“It is not all (about) making it to the Olympic games. We have a lot of children who take gymnastics to have fun and become coordinated and build their self-esteem. We try to run the full range of gymnastics, from taking (classes) once in a while to being very serious about competition.”
Crumley said that the large number of students the center has makes it financially feasible to be able to devote extra attention to gymnasts who show promise.
The center’s aspiring gymnasts usually begin competing when they are 6. In the next few years, they continue to participate in meets, sometimes even out of state, while working toward doing high-school-level skills.
“At about 10 or 11 years of age, certain individuals will emerge who are clearly a cut above the group,” Crumley said. “(They) start to show this ability and desire to learn and focus that we want to try to develop further.”
Those boys, he added, will be given a chance to test their ability at national summer camps for potentially advanced gymnasts.
Zimmerman and Agnew both started when Crumley was at the Northbrook facility. In May, at the Junior National Olympics in Orlando, Zimmerman won the all-around title for boys 14-15 (although 16, he was in that class because of when his birthday fell). Among boys 16-18, Agnew finished fifth in the all-around competition.
In Denver, they will compete against the top gymnasts in their age group in the country. At stake is a berth on the U.S. National Team, which will compete around the world during the next year. They’re in that position, Agnew and Zimmerman say, because of their work with Crumley.
“Kelly makes us do countless numbers of routines in practice,” Agnew said. “When you’re competing, it is just another routine. So you go out and hit it. One thing that makes our gym successful is the intense training. We are really prepared when we get to nationals.”
“I have been thinking seriously about the 2000 Olympics since the end of the 1996 Olympics,” Zimmerman said. “I saw then that I could be doing the skills and the routines needed to compete at that level.”
At Orlando, Zimmerman won the still rings and parallel bars competition, tied for first on vault and finished fourth in the floor exercise competition. He says he does not have a specialty but does all six events equally well, which is necessary to perform as a top-level gymnast.
Agnew, who will attend the University of Iowa this fall on a gymnastics scholarship, has competed at state and regional club championships. He won the still rings competition in Orlando in May.
The 1997 New Trier graduate opted not to compete in high school gymnastics. So has Zimmerman. They say they made that choice because of the harder gymnastics and stiffer competition at the club level.
A fellow Buffalo Grove club gymnast, Josh Levin, who will be a senior at Glenbard West High School in Glen Ellyn, competed in high school gymnastics his first two years.
Levin, 17, of Glen Ellyn led Glenbard West to the 1996 state title and also earned a 10 on the pommel horse, becoming the first male gymnast in state history to get a perfect score in high school competition. After that season, he decided to compete in the more difficult gymnastics that the club level provides.
Levin began training at Buffalo Grove in January 1996 but limited his workouts there during the high school season. He now trains 20 hours a week.
“Competing in club fit my goals more because I want to make a college gymnastics team,” said Levin, who won the pommel horse competition at the Orlando event. He said he chose Buffalo Grove because of its quality and intensity.
“We train real hard here. On some of the days before a meet, we will train 12 hours a day,” said Levin, who just missed qualifying for the Denver meet.
Despite the intensity of practices, Crumley said, the Buffalo Grove center encourages gymnasts to take a careful attitude toward training when hurt. “My rule of thumb is that if it hurts, don’t do it,” he explained.
Elizabeth Zimmerman, Kris’ mother, said she isn’t concerned about how much time her son spends at the gym. Her other two children, Gregory, 13, and Julia, 10, are also gymnasts, and both train at the center.
Because of the time and commitment needed to be a top gymnast, Elizabeth Zimmerman said, she doesn’t think the coaches at the center can push a gymnast to work longer hours than he or she is willing to do.
“That is a choice they make themselves,” she said. “A gymnast who doesn’t want to be in the gym will not last long. The key is that a child has to want to be there.”
Other gymnasts at the center hope to follow in the footsteps of Agnew, Levin and Zimmerman. And some are on their way to doing so, among them David Sender, 11, of Arlington Heights and Christopher Adams, 12, of Hoffman Estates. Those two, along with C.J. Mrozek, 11, of Lake Zurich, have qualified for a national team of 10- and 11-year-olds.
“I think this is a great place to learn gymnastics,” Sender said.
“I didn’t realize how good I was until I went to the meets,” Adams added.
The road to success, Crumley said, begins with a desire to be good and to make a commitment to working long hours.
“I have had a lot of talented kids who didn’t work hard. And then I’ve had some guys who were less talented and who worked hard and actually were better gymnasts. The hard work is what it takes,” he said.
“It is tough, because it is 52 weeks a year,” Agnew said. “We get Christmas off, and then we’re in here the 26th. But it’s worth it. You have to have a love for it. It is about the satisfaction of working so hard and then, at nationals, having it all climax and being able to say, `I’m the national ring champion.’ That means a lot.”
WOMEN GYMNASTS MAKE THEIR MARK TOO
While the boys program at the Buffalo Grove Gymnastics Center has a national reputation, the girls program has had success of its own too.
“We have a very strong and upcoming program,” said Teri Crumley, a gymnastics coach for 15 years.
In addition to regular classes, the program has 65 girls who compete on the club level; their ages range from 7 years old through high school.
The leader in that area has been Larissa Fontaine, a Deerfield resident who competed at the world championships in 1994 in Germany. As a member of the U.S. National Team, she finished 17th in the all-around competition in a field of about 100 gymnasts. Fontaine, a graduate of Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, will be a sophomore this fall at Stanford University, where she is on the gymnastics team.
While Fontaine has had success, Crumley today is working to build the skills of Nadia Ori, 16, of Highland Park, who will be a senior at Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette, and Cathy Selz, 17, of Libertyville, who will be a senior at Carmel High School in Mundelein. Ori has been with Crumley since she was in 3rd grade; Selz joined the Buffalo Grove center more than two years ago.
“(Teri) knows you and understands what you are capable of. She will make you aware of that,” Selz said.
“She makes me feel like I’ve won something, even if I haven’t won first place at a meet,” Ori said, noting that her coach stresses life skills as well as gymnastic abilities. “Gymnastics has taught me to be disciplined, face my fears and challenge myself.”
“I want the girls to perform at the level that they want to achieve,” Crumley said. “But we also work a lot on self-esteem, goal-setting, personal commitment and self-motivation. We say it is very important for the girls to be dependent upon themselves.”
Crumley brings a dietitian into the club to explain proper nutrition. She also arranges shopping trips and outings to amusement parks.
“We are more of a close family,” she said.
