It’s the second week of September, 2015 and we have just wrapped up our last staff training workshop for the summer. Even though it’s not the end of the year, for us it is. When you work with kids, the end of summer is the end of one year and the beginning of another - the new school year.

As gymnastics teachers, we see our students grow and develop in many ways during the course of a year. While driving home I began to ask myself; how have we (Fit Kids) grown and developed over this past year? How are we better than we were a year ago? What have we done in the past 12 months? Let’s see…

• We created the Fit Kids Starz Curriculum and instituted our event certificate promotion system for student recognition and advancement.
• We changed over to an online monthly tuition system and left behind the old “session” system where everyone had to re-sign up 5 times a year or lose their class spot.
• We have conducted 30 staff training workshops (we call them Smart Summits) to keep our teaching staff growing in their abilities to lead their students in their gymnastics.
• We have more than doubled the size of our gymnastics team and made the possibility of virtually every student who so desires to be on a team a reality.
• We had a super successful competition season with our teams.
• We added two new gymnastics camps, one for our gymnastics teams and one for class students. Both were big hits.
• We did not replace many of our mats this past year – that’s because the year before, we replaced nearly all of them!
• Travel and training: we went all over the country this past year to learn from the best gymnastics coaches in the world. Logging thousands of air miles going to camps, training seminars and conferences, we learned the latest ideas and training methods from some of the most successful coaches and teachers in the world, and got to meet some recent Olympic team members along the way!

Looking back on it, we did grow – a lot. We are smarter in many ways and better at doing things than we were a year ago. But enough of last year, it’s a new year now and it’s time to start looking forward again. What will we improve next? I’m pondering that one right now while reviewing notes taken from 3 days of lectures and seminars at USA Gymnastics Congress in San Jose. If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s this; we will always focus on growing and improving. At Fit Kids, that’s just how we roll!

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