15 in 15, Lesson 2: Learning to LOVE Differences
My 3-year and all-time favorite roommate, Lali Dekanoidze, and I 🫶🏻
For the 2nd edition of 15 Lessons I Learned in my 15 Years of Gymnastics (15 in 15), I want to talk about relationships and the unique dynamic of being on a team of girls from here, there, and everywhere in between.
Whether it’s club gymnastics or any division of collegiate gymnastics, your teammates become your best friends. Plain and simple.
These are the people that you spend the most time with. You go through the good, the bad, the ugly with them -- and I'm here to tell you, there's a whole lot of all 3 of those in gymnastics. You live together, you eat lunch together, you practice together, you lift weights together, you go to football games together, you cry, laugh, and joke together, you walk to classes together, you travel cross-country on buses and planes together… and the list goes on and on.
Gymnastics has introduced some of the best people into my life. And most of them are people that I would never have guessed I’d be friends with. It’s given me the chance to make connections with various people with a range of personality traits and perspectives.
With that being said, I’m not always best friends with every single person on my team. We are all human, so of course we have our differences. We each come from different backgrounds and upbringings, so not having the same values and opinions as the person next to me is natural. However, being able to create some level of friendship with every teammate is incredibly important in standing side-by-side each day.
In club gymnastics when we were all around 15 and 16 years old, let me tell you, those differences reallllyyy stretched our relationships thin (the text message wars are laughable looking back on it... if you know you know). But as I matured and transitioned into college, I found those differences to be intriguing.
I attended Brown University during my freshman year of college. If you didn’t know already, Brown is an Ivy League school located in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island. Because of the prestige of the school, along with other factors, Brown pulls students from not only across the U.S. but across the world. Each class of students, whether undergraduate, graduate, or M.D., comes from a wide variety of backgrounds.
According to an article Brown wrote when I was an incoming freshman, some stats about my incoming freshman class were:
48% of class members are students of color
Students in the class come to Brown from 66 nations
11% are international students
Beyond the U.S., the countries most represented are China, India, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Korea and Turkey
Looking past my entire freshman class and solely at the 24 girls on my freshman-year gymnastics team, we also had different backgrounds. Considering only the states that we came from, we had people from Texas, New York, California, Wisconsin, Massachusets, Oregon, Virginia, Connecticut, Illinois, Washington, Louisiana, and Colorado. The range of backgrounds was no different when I transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I want to hone in on my experience being on multiple collegiate athletic teams because, in addition to all the time we spend together, we are also working towards a common goal. For us to even come close to our goals, we must get along and work as one unit. Beyond just being able to tolerate each other, we have to care about each other’s lives and be able to lean on one another for support – especially when many of us are hundreds to thousands of miles away from our families. At the end of the day, no goal is being accomplished if you despise every person around you.
Now, what makes this so special, and honestly quite challenging at times, is the nature of being on a team where you have to like your teammates. You don’t have a choice. You are with these people for 10+ hours every day for 1-4 years. If someone does you wrong, you don't have the option to never speak to them again and completely cut them out of your life. In fact, you have to train with them tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. practice!
And these aren't people that you hand-picked to be on a team with, either. These are people who were individually recruited, just like you, with the expectation of meshing well with everyone else. In other words, you have to make it work with the teammates you were given.
Going into my freshman year, this was an unexpected challenge. I suddenly had to learn how to communicate with people like no one I’d ever known before. It took some mistakes here and there, but ultimately, I realized that these differences are what make relationships so special. Being about to hear and learn from various opinions and points of view is something that I cherish.
Turning this toward my future and the bigger picture of life, gymnastics has taught me how to get along with and love people who are wildly different than me. Because of this, I feel confident applying to jobs in cities I have never lived in before. I feel confident being placed on a workplace team where I have to collaborate with people I don’t know from a wide range of backgrounds. I feel confident being asked to look up and down the ladder and effectively communicate my progress and needs.
I am grateful for every lesson gymnastics has taught me along the way, but this one definitely falls somewhere toward the top because it has allowed me to form unexpectedly amazing friendships that I will cherish forever.
Talk soon,
🌟 Taylor
