A unique story played out at the boys gymnastics state championships, held Saturday at Hoffman Estates High School. Conant senior Sanket Vyas won the state title on the pommel horse, after he earned a nearly perfect score of 9.65 out of 10.
Sanket Vyas stands at the top of the medal podium.
Sanket is the first individual state champion in boys gymnastics at Conant in 26 years, but that’s only part of the story. It turns out, his coach, John Scallon, also was a state champion on the pommel horse, back in 2010, during his senior year at Rolling Meadows High School, and he went on to compete collegiately at the University of Minnesota.
Interestingly, neither Sanket nor his coach had ever competed in gymnastics — let alone on the pommel horse — before starting high school.
“I felt like it was a full circle moment for me,” Scallion said after the competition on Saturday. adding that he saw a lot of himself in Sanket when he first spotted him at a gymnastics meet during his sophomore year.
Sanket competes on the pommel horse at the state championship meet.
“I immediately noticed he was perfectly built for pommel,” Scallon says, “tall, lanky, broad shoulders, small hips and thin legs.”
At the time, Scallon was a coach for Rolling Meadows gymnastics, but when it came time for the Conant athletes to compete on the pommel horse at this meet, Scallon walked over to watch Sanket compete.
“When he landed, he was absolutely ecstatic and the whole team went and hugged him,” Scallon says. “At that moment it was clear. He had a close relationship with the horse.
“The horse has chosen him and he accepted the call,” he adds. “He had the passion, he had the talent, he had the physical build, and he shined like a champion.”
Coach John Scallon with Sanket Vyas
Scallon says he knew he wanted to coach Sanket and by the end of the season he became his coach, taking him under his wing and together they got to work. They spent the next two and a half years training together, both at Conant, where they worked under Head Coach Paul Kim, and at some private clubs in the area.
Sanket says that before Scallon started coaching him, he would be in one corner of the gym, trying to figure out tricks to include in his routine.
“Ever since then he changed the way i viewed pommel horse and how I trained,” Sanket says. “He got me on a strict training plan in the sense that we always had a goal in mind and we worked towards it in every practice.
“He has been a mentor in my life and just changed the way i look at my day,” Sanket adds. “He has spent so much time wor king with me and dedicated so much energy that it’s hard to put into words. I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near the podium without him.”
By his junior year, Sanket finished seventh in the state, in the newly formed Illinois High School Gymnastics Coaches Association state series. This year, he stood on top of the medal podium after a difficult and yet smooth routine, Scallon says.
“When pommel horse is performed exceptionally well, the gymnast looks like a weightless feather, flat as a board, spinning around,” Scallon says. ” A performance that gives the illusion of floating levitation is perfection and is deduction-less.”
Scallon says he got into coaching as a way to pay forward his own experience in the sport. He says his pommel horse coach, Dave Schieble, changed his life, not only in shaping him into a state champion, but in making opportunities available for him and convincing him he could succeed in college.
“That’s a big reason why I was drawn to Sanket,” Scallon says, “because I was looking for a kid like me, who wanted good training and could really benefit from good training. I was looking for someone whose soul was hungry to become the next state champ.”
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