On April 22, gymnast Cameron Rea signed to join Southern California United, an association that offers NCAA level training and competition for collegiate gymnastics. He plans to attend Allan Hancock College and eventually transfer to a CSU.
He signed the pledge at KT’s All Star Gymnastics in the Santa Maria Town Center Mall. David Eckenrode, part of the husband-wife team that runs KT’s gymnastics, said Cameron “is the first male gymnast that I know of in the Santa Maria Valley to sign on with a college gymnastics team.”
Rea, who’s the drumline captain at Ernest Righetti High School, became interested in gymnastics after watching the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, as a toddler. “I remember being on my couch and wanting to try flips and stuff off my couch,” he said.
He started gymnastics classes as a toddler. “As soon as I turned 3, my mom put me in it as soon as she could.”
Those classes started with basic somersaults and rolls.
“That’s basically what my whole life has been,” Rea said. “I’ve tried different sports”—soccer, basketball, wrestling with his brothers—“but nothing gave me the same amount of fun as gymnastics.”
Gymnastics also gave him discipline and mental focus.
“It’s taught me a lot,” he said. “If you don’t have your mind set in the right place, you’re going to keep falling and falling, and it’s just going to set you back.”
Two years ago, he broke his hand. Rea was in a cast for eight weeks, and it took six more weeks after the cast was off before he could start practicing again.
“When it happened, I was like, ‘I just bruised my wrist or something. OK, I’ll be totally fine,’” he recalled. “I didn’t go to the doctor until like two weeks after it happened.”
When he broke his hand, he didn’t stew. Instead, he used it as a chance to improve his gymnastics game in other ways, ways that didn’t need the use of his hand.
The moment he’s proudest of is winning first place at the Region 1 championships in Nevada on the vault.
“I had a relatively easy vault. I just had to have good form and stick to what I know,” he said, adding that he beat his opponent by a couple tenths of a point. “I thought he was going to win, I didn’t think I was going to win.”
His favorite part of gymnastics is the sense of zero-gravity he gets when he’s momentarily suspended above the ground.
“That weightless feeling when you’re in the air and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m flying,’” he said. “I don’t know how to compare that to anything else.”
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 7, 2015.
