Stories of Impact: Remembering That Excellence Still Deserves to Be Celebrated

Little Ms Katie, preparing for her performance debut to "Good Ship Lollipop"

This month's story of impact isn't about a competition, a performance, or a community event.

It's about me.

Over the past month, I've spent a lot of time reflecting on the kind of coach I want to be. Coaching high-level athletes is one of the greatest privileges of my life, but it comes with an unexpected challenge that I never saw coming. Excellence quietly becomes normal.

The first time an athlete climbs to the top of a silk without fear, you're ecstatic. The first clean aerial straddle earns applause. The first time someone performs a routine under the lights, it feels like magic. But after years of coaching, those once-incredible moments slowly become Tuesday afternoon. The extraordinary becomes expected. That's a dangerous place for a coach to live.

Not because excellence shouldn't become the standard. It absolutely should. Our athletes work incredibly hard to make difficult things look routine. That's the goal. But somewhere along the way, I realized I had become so focused on what came next that I wasn't always taking the time to celebrate where they already were. A student would master a skill we'd been chasing for months, and my brain would immediately move to the next progression. A routine would finally come together, and instead of saying, "Look how far you've come," I'd be thinking about the transition that still needed work. An athlete would accomplish something they couldn't have imagined a year ago, and I'd already be planning what we'd train tomorrow.

I wasn't doing it because I wasn't proud.

I was doing it because I believed in them.

But believing in someone and telling them you're proud of them are two very different things. That realization has stayed with me.

Lately, I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about coaching, leadership, and mentoring young people. Again and again, I keep coming back to the same idea: a coach has the opportunity to become one of the most influential adults in a child's life. Long after routines are forgotten and medals are packed away, many athletes will remember how their coach made them feel. That's a responsibility I never want to take lightly.

The older I get, the more I realize that coaching isn't just about building stronger athletes. It's about helping young people build confidence, resilience, discipline, and belief in themselves. We spend hours teaching body positions, technique, and choreography, but every correction, every conversation, and every celebration is also shaping the person behind the performance. That means it's not enough for me to notice their progress.

They need to hear it. They need to know that I see the early mornings, the extra conditioning, the frustrating days when nothing works, and the courage it takes to keep coming back anyway. They need to know that my expectations aren't high because they're falling short. They're high because I've watched them become capable of extraordinary things.

So this month, I've made myself a promise. I'll continue to challenge our athletes because I believe in what they're capable of. I'll continue to ask for one more rep, one more correction, and one more attempt because growth lives on the other side of comfort. But I'm also going to slow down long enough to celebrate the victories that happen every single day. The first pull-over. The fear that's finally overcome. The athlete who chooses perseverance instead of giving up. The quiet moments of growth that never make it onto social media but deserve to be recognized just the same.

Our athletes deserve coaches who help them become extraordinary.

They also deserve coaches who never stop reminding them that they're already enough.