A Fredericton Gymnastics Club Speaks Out On Restrictions: ‘We’re All So Tired Of It’

FREDERICTON – For many people and businesses, there’s been a lot say about New Brunswick’s latest move to Level 3 of its Winter Plan to deal with the spread of the Covid-19 Omicron variant.

In conversation, there’s the popular, “I can go and buy a pair of shoes, but I can’t go eat at a restaurant?” line, piled on to other opinions over the latest level of restrictions and whether those restrictions are fair to all types of business.

Miruna Timotin is one organizer who’s simply out of things to say when it comes to navigating the ever-changing rules and alert levels associated with doing business for her non-profit club, Rhapsody Rhythmic Gymnastics.

In an interview with Huddle, Timotin relayed her feelings about what is now a seasonal yo-yo of restrictions, and her frustration with the litany of changes her club has had to manage over the past 20 months.

Timotin emigrated to Canada from Romania in 2006, and soon after she arrived founded a gymnastics club in Miramichi which she operated as a business. She later pivoted to a non-profit club model after relocating to Fredericton in 2013, and it became the Rhapsody Rhythmic Gymnastics a year later.

Since then, she has made great strides for Rhapsody RG, with her club producing many talented gymnasts in the competitive stream.

A certified competition coach, Timotin describes rhythmic gymnastics as the perfect combination of sport and art, linking expressive dance steps with skillful manipulations of things like a ball, rope or ribbon, while incorporating movements and other choreography with those elements. It also helps its participants by enhancing creativity through each performance and builds self-confidence.

Over the past few years, her focus has been on keeping the club growing, offering paid programming for adults as well as children, a way she says helps provide an option for men to enter RG as well, saying it can help motivate other adults to stay active with something new.

No reward for hard work

While Timotin admits Rhapsody RG has been challenged like many other organized sports and activities during Covid-19, she and her staff, volunteers and participants have been pivoting “in the most unthinkable ways,” and forced to break far from Rhapsody’s mandate of physical and mental well-being with online classes.

“I know, we’re all so tired of it, and as a coach, my heart breaks seeing my hard-working nine-year-olds saying, ‘I have no space for my cartwheels’, via Zoom, three nights a week,” she said.

“I don’t necessarily speak for myself, I speak for the other clubs as well,” says Timotin. “And I speak for every sport or activity that’s not allowed to do anything right now. I speak from my son who is 15 and can’t play basketball.”

Timotin says initially, dealing with Covid-19 restrictions was easier. She and her staff worked tirelessly to add structure to online classes and even holding some in-person training for three months when restrictions were eased – only to arrive each September with back-to-school cases climbing, thus cancelling the first competitions her students worked so hard to participate in.

Like everything else, competitions moved online.

“Imagine having competitions online,” Timotin says. “And then knowing that we have our first competition on February 5 – I said, well, that’s literally impossible. So, everybody got involved. The association got involved. They cancelled, dispersed the competition and it’s completely cancelled right now.”

Timotin initially started out with 60 children enrolled for RG this year, a number she says now is down to about 40.

“I’d say now, due to online classes, I have emails from parents that just say, ‘Look, my kid is not interested in online classes.’ You know they enjoy being with other kids and having fun together – it’s communicating and jumping on each other’s backs,” she added.

With RG classes coming later in the day, and most recently following a full day of online school learning, it’s another session of screens for kids who have been staring at computers and tablets all day. Even Timotin agrees it’s overkill, though she understands it’s the only way she can offer her program due to restrictions.

“There was balance, but now there’s nothing. So you’re literally asking parents, adults, children, cats, everybody to stay in a house and do nothing. I just hate to sit all day long,” she lamented.

Timotin is so used to moving with the group, that she, like almost everyone else, is now stuck in idle, wondering if things will ever be the same.

“I care a lot about these kids. I care a lot about the sport, it’s just…it’s my true passion, and it’s getting more and more difficult,” she says.

Timotin says plenty of work goes into the discipline behind the sport to be ready to compete, and she usually gets to augment that discipline with the promise of the pay-off – to travel, to perform in front of others and to just compete – though none of the hotels, car trips, restaurants, pools and fun has been possible under Covid-19 restrictions.

“I feel sorry, and I feel bad to keep on telling them – ‘It will come, it will come. We will have fun…’ Like what kind of fun are you having? We’re just working, working, working, but there’s no fun,” says Timotin, referring to the online component she never thought she would ever find herself doing as a coach.

A shared frustration

“I look at every other business right now in Fredericton and I’m friends with a few of them because we have different collaborations happening, and it’s just disturbing,” says Timotin, who feels the frustration of her business counterparts has also hit an all-time high, saying everyone really does have to continue supporting each other.

Timotin says rules and limitations from the province about what is acceptable one week to the next have sometimes been difficult to keep up with for everyone.

“I really don’t want to speak for just my club. I do have the sense in speaking to people around me, from different areas of work, either business or a friend – everybody almost has something to tell me that what’s happening now – does not make sense.”

Contact tracing, once a helpful tool in New Brunswick for reporting cases and tracking the spread of Covid-19, has now become the responsibility of the public at large, something Timotin says gives her less control over who’s healthy to participate with Rhapsody RG.

Though it’s become less of a concern with competitions still cancelled and classes back online, Timotin feels the province has been reduced to reacting and is perhaps beyond thinking how measures are affecting children, adults, businesses, and clubs like hers, long term.

“I’m not a giver-upper, but I do get to wits-end, and I do get exasperated, and it feels like I just want to finish this and not ever do it again, but I will never do that,” says Timotin. “I’m always optimistic and hopeful that some things will come out in the end. I care so much and I’m so passionate about our club, that I don’t want to give up, ever.”