A Franklin youth gymnast is a national champion.
Through the past few years, Giovanna Williams has climbed into the sport’s top ranks, traversing the Southeast to compete in its toughest events. At the USA Gymnastics Level 9 Eastern Championships, the New Vision Training Center standout brought home gold in her best event.
“I made just a 9 on floor; I kind of fumbled a few of my tumbling passes. On beam I scored a 9.175, and then on bars I scored a 9.275,” said Williams of her other three events in Savannah, Georgia, May 2. “Vault is one of my more confident events, so it was almost calmer for me. … You just think about it, take a deep breath and then run down the runway. As a concept, if you think about it too much you'll freak yourself out, and so you’ve just got to trust your training.”
After her vault, a mere seconds-long event in which gymnasts bounce off an elevated springboard from a running start and perform densely-packed aerial acrobatics before hitting the ground, Williams had a feeling her score would be good enough to contend. From there, she could only wait for the judges’ results to come in.
“When I finished, I was really happy with myself. I was like, ‘Oh, I think that was actually really good,’ and then my score came up and I was really proud of myself. We all just knew I could do it, and it was really exciting,” she said. “It was not until the end [when she found out she’d actually won]. We figured that a 9.8 would keep me somewhere close to the top, but we really just had to wait for all the vault scores to come in before they could determine if I was going to win. … I was really excited. It’s really crazy to think about the fact that I'm the first gymnast at New Vision to win a national title.”
As the latest of several national qualifiers in New Vision’s history, but the first since 2014, Williams’ near-flawless vault routine won the gym’s first-ever gold. At 16 years old, the rising third-year student at Macon Early College has traveled a long road to get to this point.
“Thirteen years; I started when I was three,” said Williams of her experience in the sport. “I just fell in love with it. Pursuing it just became a habit for me, and it's my dream to keep going with it into college. It makes me happy to come here every day and pursue it, see my friends and encourage them, and the vibe in here is really great.”
“During meet season we do a lot of routines, just training those routines to get them ready to compete,” she continued. “But during the offseason, we just work a lot of upgrades and basics, working on our form and technique. Summer practices … we practice every day except the weekends, and those vary between four and five hours. … You have to keep to a strict routine; you’ve got to manage it all right.”
Through the vast majority of her life, Williams has worked her way up through the first nine USA gymnastics skill levels, adding more and more complexity to her routines over time. In the vault especially, she’s perfected an impressive routine.
“It's the event with the really long runway, and then you have the table and there's a springboard,” she said. “I do something called a Yurchenko, which is a round-off onto that springboard. Then I reach backwards into a back handspring, put my hands on the table and I do a laid-out flip off of my hands from the table and I land on the mat.”
With incredible athleticism, balance and coordination, Williams has become one of the Southeast’s top youth gymnasts. In multiple trips to the Region 8 Championships through the past few years, she’s become a regular on the national circuit.
“I'd been to regionals a couple times, but this was my first time at nationals,” she said. “Levels 9 and 10 are the only levels that can pursue nationals, and Level 9 nationals is just the eastern half of the United States; Level 10 nationals is the whole U.S. So I competed against my age from Regions 5, 6, 7 and 8, which is the eastern half of the United States.”
After multiple years of knocking on the door, Williams finally advanced to nationals this year, winning a Region 8 title in the vault and earning one of the Eastern Division’s top seven all-around scores. At nationals, she encountered a new level of competition.
“It was crazy for me to think that I was one of the people that made it, and it was just so cool to watch everyone's technique and how good they were,” she said. “It was really inspiring just to be there and see all of these girls; it was really fun to be with them and work with them.”
As the top gymnasts from their respective regions across the Eastern U.S., Williams shared a sense of camaraderie with her fellow national qualifiers, and hopes to keep in touch with her former rivals in the future. As just one of multiple Level 9 gymnasts at New Vision, she hopes to be joined by her teammates in more top competitions next year.
“There are three Level 9s right now, so we're hoping that all three of us will be able to move up to level 10,” Williams said of Lyllah Gaffigan and Lillian Ostojic. “It's been a really great season. It's really fun to just journey with them, work hard with them and compete with them. … In the regular season we're all in the same age group and we all compete together, but when it comes to state and regionals we can get put in separate groups, which we did this year because of our age difference. Lillian is 14 and then me and Lyllah are 16, and so we usually get put in the same group.”
As a Level 9 Eastern National Vault Champion, Williams is now one of the country’s top youth gymnasts. Entering her third year at MEC, she’ll also be eligible for recruitment by college programs, and hopes to study nursing and pursue gymnastics at UNC-Chapel Hill. Since returning home from Savannah, she’s even become something of a local celebrity.
“My parents posted it all over Facebook, so everyone knows,” she said. “I got a lot of congratulations, and there were a lot of people excited for me.”
Will Woolever can be reached at sports@thefranklinpress.com