Tucked away in the corner of a shopping center in College Park, a stone’s throw from the busiest airport in the country, a dozen little girls jumped off a small trampoline. The athletes inside Airborne Gymnastics Club, a gymnastics studio that Kamilah Norman owned and has operated at this location since 2018, are three, four, and five years old. The trampoline looked like a sandwich board turned on its side and the girls were having fun jumping on and off of it.
Kamilah Norman, a native of Lansing. Michigan opened the gym, first as a mobile program in the spring of 2016 before finding a brick-and-mortar location big enough to house a gymnastics studio. She wanted to teach the sport, but also make it known that gymnastics can be for any and everyone that wants to learn. She saw a need and filled it.
“I saw a need for more activities for the youth in this community,” Norman told The Atlanta Voice one Wednesday afternoon in January. “I love the sport of gymnastics and I am passionate about helping enrich lives through this amazing sport.
The need: Just 10% of scholarship gymnasts are identified as Black women, according to data provided by the NCAA. There are gymnasts making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through the Name, Image, and Likeness (NLI) money flooding college athletics.
“Parents tell me all the time that their kids are jumping off of everything at home,” said Norman. “Gymnastics is the everything sport. It helps build character, confidence, vigor, and resilience.”
Norman, a former gymnast as a youth, added that gymnastics also builds agility, flexibility, physical strength, balance, coordination, and what she called a “sixth sense.”
Norman shouted to her students, “Knees together, arms up, toes pointed.” The girls, the youngest being three years old, followed instructions and worked their way through the stations set up around the gym floor. “Tuck, work, we don’t use that word around here,” said Norman when a five-year-old gymnast said, “can’t.”
Asked what she loves most about her work as a gymnastics coach, Norman, who goes by “Coach K”, said, “Seeing their smiles. Just seeing how much they enjoy this and how they change from when they start to how far they go.”
A sign that reads, “I take small steps every day to become who I need to be” rests against one of the mirrored walls in the gym.
The travel and competition teams at Airborne Gymnastics Club USA compete all over the country. One of the teams competing at a high level, United States Of America Gymnastics Level 2, won first place at the Flippie Hippie Invitational in Columbus (Ga.) last year.
Norman says gymnastics are a good way for children to find confidence while having fun. “That’s the first thing that happens, eventually,” she said with a laugh as one of the small girls who was training that night decided to walk over to her mother who was watching from the side to discuss her hair.