NOTE: As I started researching this, I came across articles written from January 2020. Normally I would still take a look. But that was pre-covid. It might as well have been hand written by monks.
One year ago I made the incredibly difficult decision to temporarily close both of my locations because of Covid19. I had been in near constant communication with my managers at each location trying to make a sensible decision. I had gone back and forth on closing or staying open a dozen times. For every justification for one, there was a valid argument for the other. In the end, we closed when the local schools closed.
March 2020 seems like so long ago. WAY BACK THEN. by and large, people still were not wearing masks. In the stores people were shopping out of fear. Buying a years worth of groceries. It was such a frightening time. I did my best to remain positive. To believe that one way or another we would be OK.
As we emerge from this global pandemic- will the 2020s ROAR like the 1920s did? I read this article by Peter Coy in Bloomberg and used most of it in this.
The day was cold and windy. Standing outside the Capitol, the just-sworn-in president called for “a new unity of spirit and purpose” to bind together a nation that had been wracked by a pandemic and high unemployment. His predecessor wasn’t on stage. The inauguration of Warren G. Harding on March 4, 1921, marked the inauspicious, unofficial start of an historic decade. The somber mood gave no hint that America was about to go on a tear.
I believe that following this summers Olympic Games in Tokyo we will experience a great decade for gymnastics world wide. It is not going to happen overnight but we must be ready.
The Roaring Twenties saw widespread adoption of the assembly line, the automobile, radio, motion pictures, indoor plumbing, and labor-saving electric appliances. Consumerism and mass culture took shape. It was the decade of art deco and jazz, Coco Chanel and Walt Disney, The Great Gatsby and the Harlem Renaissance. It was “the first truly modern decade,” says retired Marquette University economic historian Gene Smiley.
As the U.S. suffers through another pandemic, it’s tempting to ask whether history will repeat itself. Once the virus passes, will the 2020s roar the way the 1920s did?
It’s not impossible. The past year demonstrates that the economy and society can change shape quickly. We’ve seen multiple Covid-19 vaccines developed in record time and an almost-overnight transition to remote work. Tesla Inc. delivered just shy of a half-million electric vehicles in 2020 despite the pandemic. A London-based unit of Alphabet Inc. solved a half-century-old scientific puzzle, using artificial intelligence to predict accurately how proteins fold, which could revolutionize drug discovery.
As more people receive their vaccines and economies open up- families are going to be chomping at the bit to get out and do stuff. To get their kids back into schools and gyms. I have seen a rise in enrollment my gyms as parents become more comfortable going out as members of their extended families receive their vaccines. The limiting factor will then become the economy.
The U.S. will continue to wrestle with “secular stagnation,” an economic plague of developed nations. Despite the differences, by copying what was done right in the Roaring Twenties and avoiding what went wrong, Americans can make the 2020s a success—by today’s standards, anyway.
The 1920s didn’t get off to a good start. The Spanish flu pandemic, which killed about 675,000 Americans out of a population of 100 million, was over, but the U.S. was deep into an 18-month downturn marked by the sharpest one-year decline in wholesale and consumer prices in 140 years of record-keeping. The economic miracle of the Twenties didn’t really begin until July 1921, when the recession ended and boom psychology set in.
This morning on the news I heard President Biden predict that all adults should be able to be vaccinated by the end of May. There will likely be a flicker of that mania as people emerge from their Covid-19 bubbles, ready to party. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg are predicting above-average growth in gross domestic product after a difficult first quarter, with the median forecast peaking at an annualized 4.7% in the third quarter.
Indications of pent-up demand are abundant. Carnival Corp., in a sign of confidence in the public’s desire to socialize again, plans to begin boardings in April for its biggest ship ever, the 5,200-passenger Mardi Gras. Finally free to do as they please, Americans may make like the Lost Generation, who chose to “live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love,” as the literary critic Malcolm Cowley wrote.
Gin and love make a powerful cocktail but won’t sustain us in the gym. We need a plan to bring in past students who haven’t returned since the pandemic started and Introduce new students to the sport. Then we need a plan to keep them in. Families are going to try a plethora of activities with their children. Gymnastics will only be ONE of them. Focus on what we can do that the other sports can’t.
- Individualism.
- Exceptional Customer Service
- Fun, Flips and Friends
- The base for all sports
- Being able to view the class in person or virtual (since many of us have added video so parents can watch without entering the building. )
For the average American, life changed more from 1920 to 1929 than it’s likely to change from 2020 to 2029. Electrification gave us refrigerators (instead of ice boxes), washing machines (instead of washboards and hand-cranked wringers), and radio (instead of your sister at the piano). We expected by 2020 to have flying cars. Instead we got 280 characters.
One lesson is that timing matters. The 1920s roared because technologies that had been nurtured for several decades were finally ready for mass deployment. Although that may not be the case with technology today- IT IS THE CASE WITH GYMNASTICS. Because of mismanagement at the highest levels of our sport we were struggling before the pandemic. We were just starting to be able to concentrate on the positive aspects of our sport when most of us were forced to close. With out USA Championships, Olympic Trials and the Olympics we had nothing positive in the news. We have been preparing gymnastics (as a business) for this moment for a few years. This can be our renaissance!
Introspection wasn’t the forte of the Roaring Twenties. “Torn nerves craved the anodynes of speed, excitement, and passion,” Frederick Lewis Allen, looking back from the near remove of 1931, wrote in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s.
Our nerves, too, are torn. But learning from the past can help the healing begin.
Our business, like our sport, is dynamic. We must constantly change and evolve or we will go extinct. Change is difficult- but we know how to do it.
