Students and Coaches Suffer with Gym Closing

The bleachers at the Harlem Children’s Zone Armory are empty. The young gymnasts who learn, practice and perform at the West 143 Street facility remain at home with their families. The non-profit responded early and shut down a week before New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put them on pause.

The Wendy Hilliard Gymnastics Foundation has served over 15,000 inner-city youth with free and low-cost classes at the 50,000-square-foot facility. For some of their students, this is the only time they receive some form of physical education as a result of budget cuts that eliminated gym classes in public schools. The foundation, started by the first African American U.S. Rhythmic Gymnast, Wendy Hilliard, also trains elite athletes and those who aspire for Olympic gold.

“I miss being in the gym coaching my students,” said Dennis Rivera, a 24-year-old tumble and track coach at the foundation.

For Rivera, the epidemic could not have come at a worse time.  After recently suffering from a seizure because of hydrocephalus, an abnormal buildup of fluid in the brain, he said that his health crisis and the epidemic “put a lot of things into perspective.” As a coach for six years at the foundation, he was forced to limit his movements and rethink his finances and future.

On March 18, Hilliard made the difficult decision to furlough her employees. For many of the staff, like Rivera, coaching is their main source of income and they had to file for unemployment.

The gravity of the situation did not sink in for Rivera until the second week of the closure. By this time, he was “coach sick.” He missed his students, but the bills were coming in and his illness made it unsafe for him to step outside. Despite all of this, Rivera remains optimistic and ready to get back to a new sense of normalcy.

In the weeks since the shutdown, the foundation uploaded gymnastic routines and weekly Zoom sessions to keep their Saturday students motivated and their team moving. The remote coaching was just a weekly reminder to the students that the coaches hadn’t forgotten them and were powering through this crisis with them.

Rivera wants to continue coaching his students when all of this is over. Due to his limited mobility as a result of the shutdown, he is finding new ways to work around it. He used his love of dance, to put more of his work online and is adding twists to Tik Tok challenges featuring his students.

“Returning back will be different because people will be a bit uneasy being all together” he said. But he’s ready to get back and, “…see what’s in store.”