Latin School of Chicago

Nobody could have been more surprised "CircEsteem is my community. It's fun. It's social, and I get to help other kids." 26 than Jack Gomberg '14 when at the age of 14, competing for the first time, he became the national champion in the under-18 bracket of the Wheel Gymnastics U.S. Open. Months later, Jack was again surprised when he took seventh place at the world championships in Germany. "It was crazy. I couldn't believe it," Jack said, recalling that it inspired him to make an even stronger commitment to a sport he had only discovered a few years earlier. "After that, everything took off." This March, Jack again won the Wheel Gymnastics U.S. Open, and he hopes to medal at the upcoming world championships, which will be held in the United States for the first time this July. Jack's interest in wheel gymnastics, which was relatively unknown in the United States until recently but has been part of gymnastics in Europe since the 1930s, grew out of his love for circus performance. As a 5-year-old, Jack signed up for an after-school activity L AT I N M AGAZINE with CircEsteem, a nonprofit organization based in Uptown that teaches circus skills but also provides programming to build selfesteem and academic enrichment for young people from a variety of backgrounds. He found that circus skills such as tumbling and the trapeze came naturally to him – though juggling has been more of a challenge – and he discovered that he enjoyed performing. Within a few years of taking classes through CircEsteem, Jack was invited to join the performance team and later the teen jobs program, in which older students teach younger children circus skills. He also is a volunteer for the organization's after-school homework and tutoring program. In the United States the gym wheel has traditionally been part of the circus rather than a sport. So, when eight-time wheel gymnastics world champion Wolfgang Bientzle came from Germany with the hope of introducing the sport here, he started off by teaching at CircEsteem. Jack immediately took to the wheel and has been training with Bientzle ever since.

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