Gymnasts unite to compete in Lee County
In a stunning moment of community partnerships that put student-athletes over any school district lines or personal convictions, Ascend Leadership Academy, Southern Lee High School, Lee County High School and many others came together as one for this year’s gymnastics season.
“We have kind of an unheard of situation this year at ALA, as we lost our gymnastics coach and host gym,” Jenifer Fennell said in an email. “In making phone calls last June to save our program (which currently has one athlete), Southern Lee stepped up and offered our team to practice with theirs at Lee County Gymnastics (Lee County Parks and Rec).”
“My daughter (Peyton) just started as a freshman at Ascend,” Fennell said. “Her staying at Ascend, part of it was that they had a gymnastics team. The host gym used to be Sanford Academy, but they lost their head coach, who was certified to do it.”
In stepped Lee County alum and current Southern Lee teacher and gymnastics coach, Hannah Fausz, who said last summer she was looking for a summer job to “keep money flowing in,” never expecting it to become anything major, as she hadn’t competed in gymnastics in years, but her daughter was a gymnast at Lee County Gymnastics.
“One of my colleagues approached me, and she was like, I know you’re working with gymnastics, are you going to help get the team started again? I was like, well, no, that wasn’t really in my plans or anything. And then in the fall of 2024, when school started back, the athletic director had mentioned to the staff that they wanted to get the team back going again,” Fausz shared.
The gymnastics coach also shared that another teacher at Southern Lee wanted to do it, but she was in a graduate school program and didn’t have the time. “So I was kind of hesitant, you know, not really having the technical knowledge of gymnastics, because I did do gymnastics as a kid, but not at a really high competitive level like what the high school girls compete at. I was like, I’ll be more than happy to facilitate practice and just be the adult in the room so that these girls can have an opportunity,” she added.
From Fennell’s perspective, she said it was something they navigated without much guidance.
“Nobody was really available to guide anybody at our school on how to get gymnastics set up once the coach left,” Fennell shared. “The coach kind of gave me a little bit of information, and I ended up having to make phone calls up to Raleigh and different places. And they said that Southern Lee practiced at Lee County Gymnastics.
“I started calling there and they told me that Coach Hannah at Southern Lee was the coach for high school that practiced at Lee County Gymnastics. So I reached out to her, and she was like, ‘I don’t mind coaching your daughter. I can’t really teach her anything because she’s not part of our school per se,’ but that wasn’t a concern for us.”
The biggest concern for Fennell and her family was having a coach there for Peyton at the meets, which is necessary for a gymnast to compete.
It was at the first meet, where Fausz was to be Peyton’s coach, that Fennell learned another piece to this community-driven story: Fausz had no gymnasts of her own; it was one student-athlete each from Lee County and Ascend Leadership.
“And I was like, this young lady from Southern Lee High School is going above and beyond to make sure that these two kids from two different high schools — not even her own — have a forum to still do high school gymnastics,” the gymnast’s mother added.
For Fausz, she said Fennell had reached out to Kristy Harper at Lee County Gymnastics, who got the two parties in touch, as it was cleared by Lee County Schools’ athletic director, which it was.
Other help came in from Lee County’s coach from last year, Rebecca Roberts, whom Fausz went to high school with.
“She helped me out a lot last year, like just learning how to run practice, some of the technical skills — that was the deficit I had,” Fausz said. “She was no longer able to coach Lee Senior, because she just had another child in April, and she wanted to focus on her family, which is completely understandable.
“So Lee Senior didn’t have a coach. They had sent a young lady’s name over to the former athletic director, but they didn’t move forward with her. There was one gymnast at Lee Senior, Sam Davis, and I didn’t want her to go without a coach. I was like, yeah, just let me reach out to Reggie Peace, because he’s the athletic director over there now, and my dad and he have a relationship going back almost 40 years.”
Though it took many phone calls and “string-pulling,” Fausz said it all happened because of adults wanted to make sure the student-athletes continue to have fun and “being able to do the sport that they love.”
As far as the future of gymnastics in Lee County, Fausz said she “doesn’t think too many people are really aware of it,” which is something she attributed to an overall decline of sports as a whole, but hopes that it — and other sports — will come back around and grow again.