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“You are here like in a Metro station, in and out,” said Mihai Brestyan, who with his wife, Silvia, founded Brestyan’s American Gymnastics a dozen years ago and is trying to figure out ways to keep everything under one roof, especially now that they’ve started a boys program.
Ever since star pupil Aly Raisman came back from the Olympics seven weeks ago with a couple of gold medals, Brestyan’s has been jammed with everyone from toddlers to transfers, the numbers doubling to nearly 700. “The problem we have is to find very quick more coaches to keep the standard,” said Brestyan. “Because you expect the gym to grow but not to grow so fast. You need to have good instructors to make sure that everyone is doing their job.”
The Brestyans have 15 tutors now, supervising everything from the Mom and Me program to the elite level, which produced both Raisman and predecessor Alicia Sacramone, who won a team silver medal in the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Sacramone’s comeback from a torn Achilles’ tendon fell short of Olympus last summer. Raisman is with her gilded London teammates on the 40-city Kellogg’s Tour of Gymnastics Champions.
Raisman may continue, take a sabbatical of a year or more, or retire and go to college. Talia Chiarelli, the other elite gymnast at Brestyan’s, who moved from Ontario in 2006 when father Peter became the Bruins general manager, will join Michigan’s varsity team next year.
