Catapaulted into spotlight, north shore gymnastics club scoops up titles at awards

A NORTH shore gymnastics club has won a fourth straight title at the Gymnastics NSW awards.

A NORTH shore gymnastics club swept the board in their category at the Gymnastics NSW 2012 awards last month.

SXL Gymnastics has bases in Lane Cove West, Willoughby and Lindfield and picked up their fourth straight Acrobatics Club of the Year accolade.

Head coach Xi Lin Shen and Perry Drakopoulos and Tara Sahagian, an acrobatic gymnastics pair who came fifth in last year's world championships, won coach of the year and joint international athletes of the year respectively.

Shen, a former Chinese national champion in acrobatics and artistic gymnastics and circus performer runs the club with her husband Tony Barber.

They aim to have seven groups representing Australia in next year's world championships.

Shen said her native country was a benchmark for the sport but believed Australian gymnasts, and SXL in particular, were moving in the right direction.

"We like them to enjoy themselves and to achieve as well," she said.

"All our kids are happy to be here all the time. If classes start at 5.30, they will be here at 4, you don't have to tell them anything, they will just do the things that they need to.

"We recently took 52 kids to China to train and when they came back they asked for morning training sessions starting at 6.30. It opened their eyes to compare."

Mr Barber and Ms Shen have run the club together since 1999 and now have about 600 students and 26 coaches.

Mr Barber relates the sport to certain parts of Cirque de Soleil and believes as well as physical skills the sport teaches their students' valuable life skills.

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