WILLIAMSBURG — William & Mary gymnast Summer Penzi knows all about balance; whether it be the balance beam or balancing her academic schedule while finding time to practice her flips and fugues.

Penzi began competing in gymnastics at the age of eight. When she began her training in level seven, Penzi met a Russian Olympic Coach who rubbed off on her.

“The perfectionism and desire to be the best really helped me rise to the top of my sport,” Penzi said.

That perfectionism ultimately led to a setback during college recruitment, however.

“She refused to take me to regionals and nationals during my sophomore year. Even after I had qualified. I believe that you have the power to write your own story, so I took matters into my own hands. I switched gyms my junior year, doing everything I could to salvage my recruiting potential,” Penzi said.

After sending countless recruitment videos and attending tons of college camps, Penzi met with the William & Mary coach at the national gymnastics competition.

“They told me that they really liked what they saw and wanted to stay in touch. I was finally offered a spot during the summer after my junior year of high school, and I really couldn’t have been happier,” Penzi recalled.

While flipping and twisting was her physical outlet, her emotional outlet comes through music. At the age of 11, Penzi auditioned for The Juilliard School, one of the most prestigious music schools in the world.

“I made it through the first round of auditions, which I felt was a huge milestone that I’m proud of, especially knowing that about 10% of applicants advance that far,” Penzi said.

She’s also won the Forte International Music Competition two years in a row. Her performances have taken place at both Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Penzi also won “Long Island’s Got Talent.”

“One of the most meaningful parts of my journey has been using music to lift up others. During high school, I played for patients at a regional hospital and it put a smile on my face seeing the spark of happiness I could bring to their day, no matter what they may be going through. It just gives me joy,” Penzi said.

Penzi has achieved the rank of concertmaster in every level of orchestra. She also won a concerto competition while in high school and got to perform her winning piece with a full orchestra behind her at Lincoln Center.

Combining her love for music and sports, Penzi also creates her own floor exercise music for all of her gymnastics competitions.

According to Penzi, it all takes balance.

“I like to equate it to being a juggler in a circus. That’s basically me, balancing academics, gymnastics, piano, violin. I’ve always just kept myself organized by writing out a schedule, prioritizing my activities on a daily basis. I try to take each day, recognize what needs my attention the most in that moment, and adjust accordingly. Sometimes events overlap and it’s definitely tricky, but I’ve always found a way to make it work,” Penzi said.

Penzi, a rising junior at William & Mary, also believes heavily in helping the young gymnasts of tomorrow become better athletes. She recently signed on with a sports organization to serve as a mentor to young gymnasts.

She’s also spending part of her summer coaching at a gymnastics camp in Tennessee.

“Every challenge, every late night, every moment of doubt has been worth it. My parents always pushed me to be my best and have really shown me what it means to be dedicated and determined. Their belief in me was the foundation of everything. Keep pushing when it’s hard because you are way stronger than you think you are,” Penzi said.

Penzi often posts music and gymnastics content on her Instagram. Follow her here.

Oklahoma City’s Mark Daigneault has the best record of any coach in the NBA this season. And he has the second-best record of any coach in his house.

Daigneault is a coach, and a coach’s husband, too. His wife is Oklahoma assistant women’s gymnastics coach Ashley Kerr. She and the Sooners went 33-2 this season and won another national championship, their third in the last four years.

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So, as Daigneault chases his first NBA title — he and the top-seeded Thunder open the NBA Finals at home against the Indiana Pacers on Thursday night — his wife has now been part of seven national championships over her career on the staffs at Florida and Oklahoma, the most recent of those coming just a few weeks ago as Oklahoma City was starting this playoff run.

Daigneault isn’t shy about touting the strengths of his wife’s resume, either.

“Among my wife and I, she is — by far — the more accomplished, more impressive, better coach,” Daigneault said. “She’s the real deal.”

It is a relationship born from ties to Florida. Daigneault — a Massachusetts native — was a student manager under Jim Calhoun at Connecticut, part of the team that won an NCAA championship there in 2004, then started his assistant-coaching career at Holy Cross for three years before moving on to Billy Donovan’s staff at Florida.

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Kerr, a Florida native, was a gymnast whose four years as a student-athlete for the Gators was ending around that time. She was brilliant, a four-time All-SEC academic selection, and Florida found a way to keep her with the program once her eligibility was exhausted. Kerr became a volunteer student manager for the 2011 season, then got promoted to team manager and eventually assistant to the head coach.

Along the way, she and Daigneault started dating and over time things got serious. And then, the relationship reached a key moment. Daigneault had an offer from Oklahoma City to coach the Blue, its G League franchise. He was ready to leave. Kerr had a job in Gainesville. She was not ready to leave.

“The OKC job was a no-brainer for him,” Kerr told The Oklahoman newspaper for a story in 2021. “I was like, ‘You have to do it. You have to.’”

It became a long-distance relationship for a few years, until Kerr decided it was time to leave Florida and try to embark on a coaching career in Oklahoma. The Sooners didn’t have a job for her initially, before a volunteer position opened up right around the time she was going to make the move anyway. Kerr kept that volunteer job — coaching balance beam and helping Oklahoma win three NCAA titles — for about six years, before the NCAA changed rules to allow volunteer assistant positions to be converted into full-time, paid positions.

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Over that time, Daigneault was promoted from the Blue to the Thunder, they got married and started a family.

“She has a way of connecting with our student-athletes on a personal level and is an exceptional leader,” Oklahoma coach K.J. Kindler said when Kerr was finally promoted.

Daigneault likes to say the real coaches in his house right now are the couple’s two children, ages 3 and 2, who basically run the show.

“We are not in charge,” Daigneault said. “We are just surviving.”

The younger of the two kids was born April 15, 2023 — a day after the Thunder were eliminated from that season’s play-in tournament, and the day the Sooners were competing in the NCAA gymnastics final at Fort Worth, Texas. It was also more than a week ahead of Kerr’s due date.

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Except she went into labor, in Fort Worth, around 5 a.m. Daigneault had been back in Oklahoma City for about an hour after the middle-of-the-night flight home from Minnesota, where the Thunder lost that play-in game. He hopped in the car and made it to Fort Worth just in time for the birth that morning, and later that night the Sooners won a national title. “Our team really rallied around her,” Kindler said.

There are obvious benefits to a coach being married to another coach, as Daigneault and Kerr have found. There is an understanding of the jobs, an understanding of long hours and late nights and travel and unpredictability. But when they’re home, they try to be home, not still at work.

“There’s certainly a lot more things that define our relationship together, starting with our kids now,” Daigneault said. “That’s occupying the majority of our bandwidth, but even beyond that, we’ve always tried to compartmentalize it in a way that’s pretty healthy because we both like to be home when we’re home and not just using the house as an extension of our jobs.”

Daigneault got his master’s degree from Florida, though originally intended to get it immediately after graduating from Connecticut. If he had stuck to that schedule, though, he almost certainly wouldn’t have coached at Holy Cross. He might not have made it to Florida. He might not have met Kerr. He might not be married to someone with seven national championships and counting. He might not have come to Oklahoma City. He might have missed out on these NBA Finals.

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Right place, right time.

“If you replayed my life 10 million times — I used to say a million, but now that we’re playing in the NBA Finals, I’ll say 10 million — this would only happen once,” Daigneault said. “And so, there’s never a minute that I’m not grateful.”

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AP NBA: https://apnews.com/nba

Rob Jenkins is driven to make the experience of playing hockey as an adult a memorable one in a non-traditional market.

Due to his efforts, and the significant growth displayed throughout a highly successful adult league in Louisville, Kentucky, in the last 25-plus years, Jenkins is being recognized with USA Hockey’s John Beadle Adult Member of the Year Award.

“It was pretty humbling,” Jenkins said. “It feels real nice. It was definitely unexpected, and I didn’t see it coming.”

The award is presented annually to an individual who has made outstanding contributions during many years of service to the ice hockey community as an adult player or volunteer. In 2020, USA Hockey renamed the award to honor John Beadle, who served as vice president of USA Hockey and chair of the organization’s Adult Council for 27 seasons.

Tom Cline is the current chair of USA Hockey’s Adult Council and is a vice president for the organization. In 2013, Cline won the Adult Member of the Year Award.

“He’s an example of what it means to be a leader in the sport without a title,” Cline said. “He’s doing our work for us by generating more players to the sport. He’s able to provide a platform where people can play, have fun and meet others. It’s remarkable that someone would do it for that long and at the same time he’s seen the fruits of his efforts.”

Jenkins started the Louisville Adult Hockey Players Association in 1999. It was designed to enhance and improve the four-team, 40-player in-house league. Now, the LAHPA consists of more than 40 teams and 500 players.

Keith Kenitzer plays in the league, and he’s known Jenkins for more than 20 years.

“We have hockey almost every day of the week in Louisville because of what Rob has done,” Kenitzer said. “We have leagues with teams that have a waiting list. This is great and he is very deserving.”

Louisville is famous for horse racing and basketball and hasn’t had a professional hockey team in the city since 2001 when the Louisville Panthers competed in the AHL. But Jenkins has helped carve out a niche for hockey.

There are 17 different leagues within the organization, some which include a waiting list. The LAHPA welcomes players who are true beginners, who cannot skate and don’t understand hockey, all the way to players who have played at the college and professional level.

“He has his ear tuned to the market and he understands how to offer opportunities for people,” Cline said. “There’s a lot of work that goes into it to the point where you have waiting lists for leagues. He’s succeeded in exemplary fashion.”

The Never Ever league is for players who have no hockey experience. The league is 10 weeks, with a half-hour session to learn the basics of the game, followed by an hour on the ice.

“Growing up, I wasn’t a super experienced player, so I injected all of my passion into that,” Jenkins said. “I wanted to help beginners play this game. My biggest challenge with the beginner league is that next year the guys who were beginners are much better, and they don’t belong in that league anymore. I really try to keep it competitive throughout all the divisions.”

Jenkins didn’t play organized ice hockey while growing up in Detroit, though he went to high school across from one of the local hockey rinks. After college, he started playing roller hockey while the Detroit Red Wings were winning Stanley Cups in the late 1990s, intensifying his love for the game.

“Joining a hockey league as a beginner and an adult was very challenging and not a friendly place,” Jenkins said. “I loved the game and persisted through the ridicule from others due to my limited abilities.”

Jenkins later joined a league in Louisville, but it was poorly organized.

“You would show up and your game time would have been changed without your knowledge,” Jenkins said. “You would hardly have a referee and if you had two goalies, you were ecstatic. I didn’t like driving across town and not having a game, or refs, or goalies, so I approached the owners of the arena and volunteered to run the leagues.”

At first, the owners said no, but they eventually gave Jenkins a shot and in 1999, the LAHPA was born. Jenkins published schedules on the internet, organized team captains, referees and made sure there were consistent goalies.

“I loved the game, and I wanted to get better,” Jenkins said. “But I also wanted to bring some organization to something that was second hand to the rink, so I started running the league. I embraced it and the internet was new in the early days back then, but I had websites going.”

After several years, Jenkins improved as a player but never forgot how difficult it was to start playing as an adult. That’s when the idea of the Never Ever league came to mind, a place where somebody with zero experience could learn and play hockey with others just like them.

The Never Ever league started in 2006 and has introduced thousands of players to the game.

“My best days of hockey were yesterday, but this makes me feel like I’ve done something to help,” Jenkins said. “Players feel like leadership cares, and it organically grew.”

As for Jenkins, he still plays at 55-years-old, but he’s currently out of action after undergoing hip replacement surgery in April. No matter how long Jenkins plays, his impact on the game will be felt for years in Louisville.

“If you have a product that is good, that’s organized, well-run and disciplined, the word gets out and people want to be part of it,” Cline said. “He’s been able to sustain that and not lose the culture while expanding. A lot of times, the details get lost, and you lose some of that, but clearly that’s not the case with Rob. He’s still laser focused as if it were a startup operation and that’s part of his success.”

Story from Red Line Editorial, Inc.

During the summertime, State College is largely quiet and many Penn State clubs are on break, with no meetings or events.

However the Social Dance Club is still holding open-door lessons for various styles of dance throughout the summer at either the State College Municipal Building or the HUB-Robeson Center from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on most days.

Isabella Ramirez, the president of Social Dance Club, said the club has had to alternate between the two locations due to scheduling conflicts during the summer regarding their availability.

“It’s just a little lighter I guess,” Ramirez, a third year studying biotechnology, said. “We have a few days that we’re in and out of the municipal building as well as the HUB just because scheduling gets a little bit difficult and just to give people a break.”

Ramirez also said instructors were “in and out,” and that attendance is more “free-flowing” during the summer when compared to the fall and spring.

Hugo Ayala, an instructor for the Social Dance club, said holding  summer lessons allows for there to be a distraction from other stressors for both students and community members.

“There’s a distraction for them during the summer as [compared to] just doing research and work and also members of the community can go there and just use the time to have an extra hobby to do,” Ayala, an assistant research professor in the Eberly College of Science, said. “It does help to have a little bit of dancing sometimes, just so that people can practice what they already learned during the semester.”

CJ Witherell, treasurer of the Social Dance Club, said the continuation of lessons into the summer — despite the fluidity of attendance — allows community and club members still in State College to stay connected through the club.

“The group is run by a combination of grad students and undergraduate students.” Witherell, a PhD student studying mechanical engineering, said. “A number of our members are graduate students and community members who continue to live in State College over the summer and we just really want to see our friends and continue to work on our dancing.”

They said due to the turnover of members across semesters there were some challenges with organizing lessons, training new executive members, scheduling the room for lessons and determining the availability of instructors.

Witherell said despite these challenges being able to offer others the ability to dance is something that fills them with great joy.

“Dance is the thing that has always brought me the most joy in my life and that’s where a lot of my deep friendships stem from and so it’s just really important to me that it’s accessible to other people,” Witherell said. 

Erin Blose, another instructor for the Social Dance Club, said while summer lessons see smaller attendance than the fall and spring, they allow for greater flexibility with how she carries out lesson plans.

“During summer, since we have generally less attendance because people are not in town, we will match it to who’s there so we’ll show up with a thought of a lesson.” Blose, a Penn State alumna, said. “If brand new people are there, we will do brand new things. If people show up who have been going all year for the last two semesters, that topic that we’ve thought of — we’ll try to find ways to apply it in a more advanced manner.”

Blose also said the more relaxed nature of summer lessons allows for instructors to provide a more open and approachable atmosphere compared to the fall and spring semesters.

“We try to be so friendly and open and willing to work with whomever shows up because we’re just happy to dance with anybody who’s there,” Blose said. “Anybody who wants to dance should be able to dance and we’re happy to work with wherever you’re at.”

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