As an artistic gymnast, Anna MacDonald was a Level 9 competitor - just one rung below national-calibre. While she was still enjoying herself, she wanted to try something a little different.
Inside the Prince George Gymnastics Club, the solution was right in front of her.
The club had a double-mini trampoline and a pair of full-sized trampolines, so MacDonald decided to add some bounce to her training schedule.
That was a little more than a year ago, and, since then, MacDonald has developed an impressive array of high-flying skills. She has come so far, in fact, she has earned the right to compete at the Canadian championships in the double-mini. She's also close to qualifying for nationals on the full-sized trampoline and hopes to post the required score at the KGTC Invitational, which starts today and runs through Sunday in Kamloops.
Nationals are May 29 to June 4 in Edmonton.
For MacDonald, who is now 16, making the transition from artistic gymnastics to trampoline was a difficult process.
"It's still hard," she said. "The arms are different, the positions."
MacDonald, however, has been helped greatly by her eight-year background in artistic gymnastics.
"I've done a lot of high-level artistic too, so that definitely helps skill-wise and getting through skills and learning them," said MacDonald, who is still training as an artistic gymnast and puts in about 22 hours of practice time each week between the two disciplines. "The only thing that's different is just the way you do them. So, same skills, you've just got to learn a little bit of a different way."
In a double-mini trampoline competition, the athlete makes an approach on a runway and mounts the slightly-angled front part of the apparatus with a feet-first jump. That creates an initial bounce, and then a second bounce on the flat portion of the trampoline is used to perform a skill. A third bounce sets the competitor up for the dismount. Each participant gets a maximum of four attempts (two in a preliminary round, two in the final) in front of a panel of judges.
On the double-mini, MacDonald needed a score of 59.9 to qualify for nationals and nailed a 60.1 at a meet in Coquitlam at the end of January.
"It was really exciting," she said. "We got the score cards and saw that the score was above the qualifier so I was really happy."
On the full-sized trampoline, MacDonald will be looking for a national-qualifying score of 58.3 this weekend in Kamloops. Earlier this season in New Westminster, she fell short of qualifying by a sixth of a point.
"I've added a few more skills (since then)," said MacDonald, a Grade 10 student at College Heights secondary school. "I've actually added more national skills, which I don't need yet at this level but they're good to have. I've done a lot of work on the routines."
To put the difficulty level into perspective, one of the national-level skills is a double front-flip with a half twist, straight into a double back-flip.
For MacDonald and other trampoline performers, there's a rule for how to keep oriented in the air.
"We're told to never look up because you can lose your balance really easily," MacDonald said. "You work on arm positioning - your arms help you keep balanced, in the way that you have to jump with your arms. I like to fly with my arms - my arms don't usually go in that way.
"It takes a while," she added. "I coach young ones in trampoline so it's seeing them go all over the place. I think after a while you just kind of know where you're supposed to go. And when you flip, after a while you don't even think about it. Your body just kind of does it."
MacDonald herself is coached by Carol Garcia.
"(Trampoline) was kind of a natural thing for her," Garcia said. "We knew when she got on tramp that she wasn't scared. She was fearless, I guess. It was her thing, definitely."
