Ready all-around

It would be understandable if Willie Ito just about missed his 17th

birthday.

In a few weeks, Ito will travel to Colorado Springs, Colo., to

participate in a gymnastics camp at the U.S. Olympic Training Center.

He’s earned his way onto the Junior National Team for the second time in

his career (the first was in 1999), meaning he’s among the top seven

gymnasts nationally in his Class 2 age group.

The Huntington Beach High School junior, who turned 17 on Tuesday,

also won the Junior Elite Class 2 all-around title at the U.S.

Championships held in Philadelphia in August. And he is a national

champion on the parallel bars, pommel horse and took the bronze on the

high bar.

Not bad for a young athlete whose parents placed him in gymnastics 11

years ago in an attempt to harness his energetic ways.

“My mom and dad put me in a gymnastics class to prevent me from

getting hurt, basically,” Ito said, laughing. “I had a lot of energy and

was always doing flips on my own. . . . Basically, I was bouncing off the

walls.

“What gymnastics did was give me coordination and a way to release my

energy. My parents put me in the class for one year, then gave me the

option after that of staying with it or I could quit. I was having such a

good time, I stayed. I’ve been in gymnastics ever since.”

Ito has been competing since he was 10 and became a Class 5 Western

Regional champion when he was 11. Since he began competing, the 5-foot-5,

125-pound dynamo has trained with former pommel horse world champion and

Chinese Olympic team member Li Xiaoping, the owner of South Coast

Gymnastics in Santa Ana.

His other training coach is former elite gymnast Tim Picquelle.

Ito trains at the center five days a week, three or four hours a day.

And he does it with passion, Xiaoping said.

“Willie’s a very dedicated gymnast,” he said. “He’s really thinking on

the floor and is quite smart with his training. He has done an excellent

job this year.”

Ito trains with South Coast teammate Bryan Del Castillo, a Class 3

junior national champion, which puts two of the three class junior

national champions under Xiaoping’s guidance.

Gymnasts compete in a class according to age, with Class 1 retaining

the eldest gymnasts.

Ito won the Class 2 all-around title -- events include floor, pommel

horse, rings, vault, parallel bars and horizontal (high) bars in

Philadelphia, where he also earned the national crown on the parallel

bars and pommel horse.

With the season now behind him, he continues to train without fail,

readying himself for the upcoming season. It will begin at the end of

January, with the first competition being the Stanford Invitational in

Palo Alto.

Ito won his class competition’s all-around title at Stanford two years

ago.

It will be one of roughly seven competitions he’ll enter throughout

the upcoming season.

For all the time he has invested in gymnastics, Ito says he doesn’t

feel he’s missed out on much.

“I still manage to find time to go to the movies, the beach, hang out

with my friends,” he said. “Gymnastics has been a very worthwhile

experience. I really don’t look at it as sacrificing one thing for

another. The main thing is that I’m having fun with this. I still make

the time to hang out with my friends.”

While at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, Ito will train for up to

seven hours per day and receive instruction from Olympic athletes and

coaches. He will depart for Colorado Springs on Oct. 7 and will spend a

week there. In addition, he’ll get to train with the Chinese national

team, which will also be housed at the training center during that time.

Ito is familiar with the Chinese team members, as he went to China

this summer and had the chance to train with them.

“It was a great experience,” he said. “I learned a lot from those

guys, and now it is my turn to play host to them.”

It will be the first of three camps Ito will attend at the center as a

junior national team member.

He lists the pommel horse and high bar as his favorite events and

cites the rings as his weakness.

“Yeah, I need to work on my strength with that,” he confessed. “I’ll

hit the weight room to take care of that.”

Ito seems always to find a way to work on bettering himself. It began

with finding a way to limit his “bouncing off the walls,” to present day,

which finds him working toward earning a scholarship to attend college in

2003. His ultimate goal is to make an Olympic team.

Xiaoping sees a long road ahead for one of his prized pupils.

“Willie has a very bright future in gymnastics,” he said. “He’s a

great gymnast, and I’m very excited where this can take him. He has the

tools and dedication to go very far.”

Still, Ito says there’s one important factor that keeps him in the

sport: “The bottom line is to just have fun, and that’s exactly what I’m

doing.”