“The face of the gymnastics in Anchorage is calling it a career” plus 1 more |
| The face of the gymnastics in Anchorage is calling it a career Posted: 09 Jun 2010 11:48 PM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Babe Cassel is about to leave Alaska in her dust, something that may give you pause when you consider that in the 32 years since she opened the state's first private gymnastics school, an estimated 960 pounds of chalk has been turned to dust by tens of thousands of boys and girls who have tumbled and vaulted their way through the Anchorage Gymnastics Association gym. A farm girl from North Dakota who is returning to the family farm later this month, Cassel brought gymnastics to Alaska when she moved here in 1965 to teach physical education at UAF. She moved to Anchorage three years later and has been integral to the sport's growth and survival ever since, doing everything from coaching high school gymnastics to bringing U.S. Gymnastics Association regional competitions to town, preparing scores of athletes for college careers, luring Olympic gymnastics stars to camps, planning clinics for judges and mentoring young coaches. "Babe is gymnastics in this town," said Paul Stoklos, the longtime gymnastics coach at UAA who said Cassel picked him up at the airport in 1984 when he came to Anchorage to interview for the UAA job. "We were at a going-away party for her and we were thinking that probably 80,000 to 100,000 kids have passed through that gym. Classes, summer camps, birthday parties -- just think of how many people go through that facility." And almost everyone who passed through AGA knows Cassel, a fixture at the Potter Drive warehouse that is home to her life's work. "She was there all the time," said Dave Nicholls, whose now-grown son and daughter both attended AGA when they were growing up. "Her influence permeated the whole gym." With just days remaining before she drives back to Bismarck, going-away parties are filling her nights, but the gym still fills her days, just as it has for three decades. "I spent my life here," Cassel, 73, said on a recent afternoon at the gym.
LONG, HARD ROAD Cassel's connection with athletics dates back to the dark ages, those pre-Title IX years when opportunities to learn and compete in sports were practically non-existent for girls and women. She played basketball when there were six girls to a side, and half of them weren't allowed to cross half-court. She went to college when NCAA sports were for men, not women. She became a high school coach when schools spent little, if anything, on the girls teams. "We washed windows at apartment buildings and we sold stuff and we cleaned houses so we had the money to buy body suits and warmups," she said. But because she grew up on a farm, where physical labor was routine, Cassel liked being active. And so even though organized sports for girls were scarce when she was growing up, she made physical education one of her minors when she went to college and then earned a masters degree in PE. The masters degree helped her land a job as a professor at UAF, where she stayed until getting married and moving to Anchorage. In 1973 she started teaching and coaching at East, and it was there that Cassel became enamored with gymnastics. "I just enjoyed it. I enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment when you're able to perform a trick. With team sports, I didn't get that feeling," she said. She became a self-taught coach who scoured magazines and books for information about the sport and who traveled to clinics and camps whenever she could. She did the same thing when she realized Alaska needed gymnastics judges, and then she shared what she learned so others could become judges too. Cassel opened Anchorage Gymnastics Association in 1978 partly out of convenience. The gymnastics coach at East High at the time, Cassel also coached several gymnasts privately, and each morning she would drive all over Anchorage to round them up and bring them to 5 a.m. practices at East. "It was a big hassle," she said. "One day I said to my husband, I'm going to open up a gym." She found a suitable building and did just that. She notes with pride that she only had to borrow money once -- $1,000, to buy a vault, a vaulting board and a yellow mat that still gets some use. She did the rest with savings, her teaching income and a willingness to work early and late every day to keep the new business going. The first gym was in a building about a block away from the current one. Cassel stayed there 14 months, until the parents of a student told her about a bigger warehouse on Potter Drive. "I remember looking at the ceiling and thinking, how am I possibly going to fill this place up?" she said. Her concern was unwarranted. Cassel always found ways to fill the gym, where it was with summer camps, pre-school and kindergarten classes or dance classes. She expanded the Potter Drive gym a couple of times, growing from 9,360 square feet to 22,800 square feet while adding features like a climbing wall. When a fire tore through the building in June 1997, Cassel and the AGA were back in business by September of that year.
'NO NONSENSE' Cassel says kids and parents who come to her gym know her in one of two ways. "Either as a bitch with the big mouth who sticks to her guns, or as an extremely kind-hearted person," she said. At 5-foot-2, Cassel weighs maybe 115 pounds and is smaller than some of her students. But she commands respect. "She's no nonsense," Nicholls said. "That's a big, dusty, noisy gym, but when she'd come out of that office and say 'Troy Monroe, get over here,' everybody would know Troy was in trouble. "... But she really did have a heart of gold. Those boys would wrap her around their little finger. Babe's an absolute saint for putting up with all those teenage boys." Cassel often travels with her gymnasts when they compete Outside, and because so many events take AGA gymnasts to Seattle, Cassel years ago bought a house in Seattle that sleeps 25 so the team wouldn't have to spend money on hotels. She sold it recently, not long after deciding to hand over operations at AGA to Paul and Rachel Gebauer. The Gebauers will replace Cassel as directors of Anchorage Gymnastics, which Cassel established as a non-profit business from the beginning so that if parents wanted to make donations to the gym, they could do so easily. Once the gym became a success, Cassel was happy to continue as a non-profit. "I didn't have any kids and I didn't really need the money, and I wanted it to be something for the community," she said.
'It's time' One Sunday during the winter of 2008, Cassel decided to give up the gym and return to North Dakota. No long deliberations, no list of pros and cons. She woke up knowing she wanted to head back to the farm and she started making plans that day to leave. "It's time," she said. "It's going to be tough these last few days, but I feel like it's my time to give it up and let somebody else do it," In 2007, Cassel was diagnosed with kidney disease and had started making more trips back to Bismarck to visit a brother and sister who still live there. She likes the idea of being near family if she winds up needing dialysis. She's building a house on a parcel of land near Bismarck that was part of the farm she grew up on. Waiting for her there is a garden and 3-year-old Billy Boy, a palomino quarterhorse she intends to ride every day. Cassel said she will miss her Anchorage garden, her home, her friends and the gym. But mostly she will miss the kids who come to her gym. "Children have a warmth about them," she said. "I'll miss the smiles and the rewards they give you just by saying your name."
Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4335.
Open House An open house will be held in honor of Babe Cassel from 7-9 tonight at the Anchorage Gymnastics Association gym, 525 W. Potter Drive. Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Facilities frustrate UI gymnastics Posted: 09 Jun 2010 01:27 AM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. The University of Iowa athletic department can point to a number of shiny new facilities and the happy coaches who have moved into them over the past decade. Gymnastics, stuck in the proverbial closest in the Field House, hasn't gotten anything shiny or anything happy. "We need a solution for our gymnastics facilities," Iowa athletics director Gary Barta said Tuesday during the Presidential Committee on Athletics meeting. "We know we have to upgrade. We don't yet have the funds and don't yet have a plan." About five years ago the equity subcommittee of the PCOA made of list of athletic improvements that needed to be addressed on campus. Gymnastics was all over the report and the deadline for changes was spring 2011. "I was concerned to hear several months ago that that would not be done," said Jean Jew, a professor of anatomy who serves on the PCOA. "I was especially concerned that there was no plan for doing that." Women's gymnastics coach Larissa Libby, entering into her seventh season as coach and 11th overall with the program, was frustrated by the lack of attention. "Those things on the gender equity report were things we felt we needed," Libby said. "It's been five years now. In that time, we've had a coat of paint. That was supposed to keep us quiet. "It's a nightmare to get anything done for us." Libby said she doesn't like to show recruits the facility in the North Gym of the Field House because it is less impressive than most club or high school facilities. In addition, to get to the women's gymnastics locker room area, gymnasts have to go downstairs and through the general public women's locker area to a back door. "It's way in back," Libby said. "We have two male assistant coaches. How are they supposed to go through?" Also near the top of her concerns was the lack of safety in the training areas. Most modern facilities have pits filled with foam for gymnasts to land safely when working on jumps or new routines. The Field House has practice mats over a hard floor. "We're doing the best we can to keep our kids safe," Libby said. "It's very minimal what we can and cannot do. It gets harder and harder every year just to keep them safe." Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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