For the first year, the girls’ gymnastics team has become an official sport for the school. Practice began on Tuesday Nov. 12 for the six girls on the team. “It’s always been a sport, but we used to combine with Monroe,” Team captain Olivia Conley said, “This is the first year that it’s actually been like a GP sport.”

While the gymnastics team is now competing by themselves, they combine their practices with a group called Sno-Co gymnastics, which includes Snohomish County high schools, Glacier Peak, Monroe, and Snohomish, where each school’s small group of girls is able to practice in a gymnastics facility. Practice takes place in Monroe at Sky Valley gymnastics academy each day beginning at 2:45 p.m. for the girls, with the exception for Fridays when practice begins at 1:45 p.m. “You get to meet a lot of new people. It’s harder to talk with them though, because you don’t have the same teachers, so you can’t talk about those kinds of things with them,” sophomore Cara Lamping said, “They’re all really nice.”

Daily practice begins with independent warm up for about 15 minutes and then stretching as a group for another 15 minutes. Event practice involves beam work, bars, vault, and floor. Although practice is done together, each school competes separately at competitions and has their own team captain. “I’m technically the co-captain, but I’m captain for GP. They’re two other captains. One for Monroe and one for Snohomish,” Conley said.

With the first competition on Dec. 12, the girls prepare to compete in their routines, choosing their choreography and music for certain events. At competitions, every girl competes for each event with limited time to warm up, which involves preparation for the events before competing. “We have a certain amount of time for warm up on each event before the competition starts and then we compete every event after we are done warming up and stretching,” Conley said.

Now as an official sport at the school, more girls have decided to join the small, but growing, gymnastics community. “Everyone is really sweet and so positive,” freshman Reeya Shinde said, “Everybody is so fun, and it’s just a happy place.”