Esprit brings English glory to Swindon

The next story from 2011 was about our girls at the English Championships!

Swindon’s Commonwealth and World training venue, Esprit Gymnastics, has further boosted the town’s reputation as a centre of excellence for gymnastics, with outstanding results at this years English Rhythmic Gymnastic Championships held at the impressive GMAC Centre in Birmingham.

The Stratton based club had eight gymnasts qualify for the event and returned with a hat full of medals as well as the overall English Junior Champion, in Stephanie Sherlock.

The English Championships is only open to British Championship qualifiers and Esprit’s seven qualifiers were – Maya Lucas, Gemma Rand, Katy Coleman, Ellie Morse, Tayshan Dowe, Gabriela Caruso and Stephanie Sherlock.

They were joined by team-mate Fleur Randall who made qualification via the National grades finals, where she won Gold with her Hoop routine and was third overall.

Just to qualify for the English Championships, puts a gymnast at the very top of the sport in the UK and the Esprit girls showed their true spirit, determination and attention to detail, by turning in some memorable performances.

All girls performed spectacularly well, with Maya earning 4^th place overall in the Junior section. She was then followed up by Gemma Rand who herself won very impressive Bronze medals with her Hoop and Clubs in the Senior section.

It was then left to Stephanie to show why she is ranked as one of the top junior gymnasts in Great Britain, with 4 Gold medals in all her apparatus, Hoop, Clubs, Ball & Ribbon, as well as the overall title of English Junior Champion.

It is also testament to her character that Stephanie, who lives in Moscow, only flew into England 2 days before the competition and then had to return immediately after.

Stephanie, who’s father is English, splits her time between Moscow and Swindon and Esprit’s head coach, Deb Hows, regularly makes the trip to help with her training when she is in Russia.

Deb said, “having Stephanie as a part of Esprit is a joy, she is an exceptional young athlete. We have formed very close links with her club in Russia and between us hope to see her achieve great things. The link between our clubs can only help to improve gymnastics in the UK and we regularly take our own gymnasts to Russia to see how our training compares to that in Stephanies Russian club”.

“It’s a great way of getting our gymnasts to appreciate how other cultures live and train, we have all learnt a great deal from one another.”

Esprit has already produced some of GB’s leading gymnasts. With the clubs senior gymnast, Jade Faulkner now training at Bath University with one of the Rhythmic Groups, vying for a spot in the 2012 London Olympics. And Laura Halford, who will be competing in the Welsh National Championships as she is not eligible for the English, because she competes Internationally as a Welsh born gymnast.