Bunny’s first tumbling competition at club level

Bunny has been doing acro gymnastics for six years now and has been lucky enough to start doing acro gymnastics competitions around this time last year. She has won a medal in all but one competition, that she has taken part in since (including some gold’s). In September last year, she got invited to start doing tumbling classes alongside acro. We thought it’d be years before she got invited to do a competition in tumbling, but amazingly, she actually did her first tumbling competition last weekend, after just one year of training in tumbling. Not only did she have the opportunity to do this competition, but she skipped out level 1 and went straight in to compete at club level 2.

As the tumbling competition was in Sherborne in Dorset, it also meant some of our family were able to come and watch her (I’m originally from Dorset and that’s where all my family live). Bunny loves having lots of support, even though she had no expectations of winning a medal.

Tumbling competitions are very different in format to acro competitions so we both learnt a lot.

Bunny had to do three runs, each of which she’s been practicing at gym. I was told there were 14 competing at her level.

As per the curse of parenting, I have the issue of watching gymnastics with mum goggles on. I don’t know much about the technical side of gymnastics or how the judging works. Which means, all the gymnasts look fantastic to me and I have to lean to her coaches to tell me how well she did on a technical basis. We were told that her 1st and 3rd runs were very neat and tidy, but she didn’t hold her finishing position for long enough on the 2nd run.

(You can watch Bunny’s 3 tumble runs here)

With this in mind, I really wasn’t expecting Bunny to medal. And knowing also that this was her first tumbling competition, we were looking at it more as experience, than anything else.

When the results came out, we quickly found out that Bunny had actually come 2nd in her category and she took the podium for the silver medal. I watched with immense amounts of mum pride as she beamed from ear to ear.

I love watching gymnastics, especially when it’s my daughter performing. I’m so proud of how many medals she’s won in her first year of both acro and tumbling competitions. To get a medal in her first ever tumbling competition, to me, is just brilliant. It also goes to show how good her coaches are, and that it was worth the six years of persevering, to get where she is now. She still has a long way to go to pursue her goals as she dreams of one day being on one of the elite squads, but she’s absolutely loving every second of being at competition level. She comes home from all her training sessions full of such enthusiasm.

She has another competition soon at her own club, and then not long after that, will be their Christmas display. This year, the twins will also be in the Christmas display for the first time, so you can only imagine how excited I am to watch the show.