Kami Doberstein said a strange feeling accompanied her first visit to the West Salem High School gymnasium this season.
The Aquinas senior wasn’t able to compete in gymnastics last season because the co-operative team based in West Salem didn’t have enough competitors.
Well, West Salem/Aquinas is back after a one-season absence with a surge of new competitors ready to tackle a varsity schedule.
Coach Amy DuPont said numbers have risen from only a couple to 15, and that’s the number of athletes she began working with last week.
“It was a little weird at first having so many girls in the gym,” said Doberstein, one of the captains for the co-op squad.
That fact made the task for day one pretty straightforward.
“The very first day we played the name game,” said DuPont, who coaches the team alongside Carrie O’Hearn and Kelly Schams. “It’s interesting when you walk in as a coach and you only know two of the kids.”
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The majority of the girls — 10 — come from West Salem. Four are from Aquinas and one is from Bangor.
According to Doberstein, it won’t take long for the teammates to form a tight-knit group.
“We spend a lot of long hours at the gym, so gymnastics is a nice sport to get to know each other,” Doberstein said.
Since only two of the athletes — Doberstein and West Salem senior Ali Ristey — have high school gymnastics experience, DuPont wouldn’t have been surprised if it was a “complete rebuilding year” within the program.
But despite an lack of high school experience, DuPont said the amount of strength and natural ability has been early to the coaching staff early on. She said that the coaching staff set a goal to teach each gymnast a new skill this season, and the payoff is unfolding even quicker than she’d imagined.
“I can honestly say that we almost (did) that in the first four days of practice,” DuPont said.
That strength was evident during a pull-up contest the girls had during an early practice, in which freshmen Cherie Lun and Alaina Miller each completed 12.
“You can tell the girls have been working out,” Doberstein said. “They are bringing skills to the team that we haven’t had before.”
There’s still a long way to go to reach the level of the co-op teams that reached the state meet five consecutive times between 2008 and 2012, but for girls like Doberstein and Ristey, it’s nice to be back out competing.
The lost year made the captains have to grow up that much faster.
“It came quicker than I thought,” Doberstein said of her senior season. “It feels like I was just a freshman or sophomore looking to the seniors for guidance, and now that senior is me.”
Winning the Coulee Conference and topping a number of other local teams at the Viroqua Invitational are tops on the team’s to-do list.
If the progress the gymnasts have shown in the early stages of practice continues to expand, DuPont said that it’s a group that can absolutely attain its goals.
“They’re talented, young and undeveloped,” she said, “but they’re just the beginning of what is going to be a good program for years to come.”
