To say Shannon Fairservice got an early start on life as a gymnast would be an understatement.
She's been rolling and tumbling on gym mats since she was 18 months old.
Now 17 and a senior member of the Prince George secondary school gymnastics team, Fairservice was too young to remember when it all began, but she knows why her parents thought it might be good idea.
"Apparently when I was a year-and-a-half I walked into the living room one day and swung my leg up onto the coffee table and my mom looked at my dad and said, 'We either have to put her into dance or gymnastics,'" said Fairservice.
"Dance wouldn't take me that young but gymnastics would and they stuck me in."
The parent and tot program remains one of the many popular programs at the Prince George Gymnastics Club and Fairservice has progressed up the ladder in the club's recreational programs, having joined the competitive program when she was nine.
Her first experience at the high school provincial meet four years ago as a Grade 8 student at PGSS was not what she had envisioned. Just before the meet she broke her ankle trying to land a jump practicing her floor routine, but that didn't stop her from making the 16-hour trip to Powell River. On crutches, with her leg in a cast, she went along for the ride just to support her Polar teammates.
Still nursing an elbow injury which kept her out of the Zone 8 meet last weekend in Quesnel, Fairservice competed Thursday in the girls Level 3 events on Day 1 of the three-day meet at PGSS gym. With 56 athletes in her category, her goal was a top-10 finish.
"My floor (exercise) was pretty good, even though I injured myself a couple weeks ago I managed to do all my tumbling lines I was supposed to do," said Fairservice. "My difficult element was my first tumbling line - back handspring, back handspring - and definitely my leap line, my split jump, straddle jump. My straddle jump (doing the splits in midair) is how I hurt my ankle a few years ago, so that's a bit stressful and I have to be precise in how I land that."
Fairservice is also helping organize the meet. Between setting up the apparatus at the gym late Wednesday night and an early-morning arrival at school Thursday she didn't get a lot of sleep the night before her competition. After nearly 16 years of gymnastics, a sport that punishes mentally and physically, she knows how to get herself ready, putting aside her aches and pains to get her game face on.
"It can be stressful and it can also be very tiring, lots of injuries and you have to be tough," said Fairservice, who trains for her sport 12 hours per week. "It's the floor where you get most of the injuries because you're doing a lot of blind skills where you're going backwards a lot and you do a lot of things that you can't be totally precise on. The beam, you've got to be precise on, and if you're not you're probably going to hurt yourself."
Floor is her favourite event and Fairservice did not hesitate when asked what her least favourite is.
"It's definitely (uneven) bars, I've never been a strong bar athlete, I've never had the upper-body strength for it," she said.
Carol Garcia, the Prince George club's head coach, says Fairservice is also dealing with knee and ankle injuries but hasn't let that limit what she wants to achieve in her last season.
"Her love of the sport has made her stuck with it - she's just a happy girl and she likes training and that's important," said Garcia. "She's gone through those injuries and we weren't sure is she was going to do all her (tumbling) line but she did it because it's a competition and it's in her home school. That puts a little pressure on her to do everything. She's graduating this year and wants to finish it off with a bang."
As a PGSS senior, Fairservice is looking forward to dipping her hands in paint to put a permanent mark on the Polars' wall, an honour bestowed on each graduating member of the team. That history goes back only eight years, when PGSS started the district's first high school gymnastic team program team in 2010.
The club season ends in June and this will be Fairservice's last year of competitive gymnastics before she moves to Abbotsford to begin her one-year missionary studies program at Columbia Bible College.
Building off the momentum of the 2015 Canada Winter Games, which provided the training for enough volunteers to stage a large-scale meet, the city is hosting the high school provincial event for the first time ever. The meet involves 227 female and 35 male athletes.
The PGSS team has just seven athletes, not enough to field an athlete in all five levels, male and female. But two Prince George district schools - College Heights and Duchess Park - are in the running for the team titles. College Heights has 13 gymnasts entered and Duchess Park has 12. There are seven gymnasts from Kelly Road, five from D.P. Todd and one from Nechako Valley in Vanderhoof.
"I'm really excited (the provincial meet) is here in our high school," said PGSS coach Maizie Bernard. "Gymnastics in the city has a great reputation - the gymnastics club is bursting - and it's another great opportunity for students to do a high school sport. Often, kids stop doing their sports in high school so I think having it here, they see all these teenage athletes out here competing, from beginners to the top level in the province."
Terry Mitruk of North Vancouver, president of the B.C. School Sports Gymnastics Association, says it's important to move the provincial event beyond the usual host sites to help grow the sport.
"We wanted to give kids exposure to life outside the Lower Mainland and give kids an opportunity to travel with their teams because often this is held in the Lower Mainland," said Mitruk. "We want to get exposure in the schools so kids can see they don't have to start when they're five, they can start gymnastics in high school and learn some real cool tricks that set them up for a lifestyle and healthy active living."
