I guess if I whine like I did in the previous post it does get results! Who says nagging doesn't work. And you know you can leave comments at the end of each post.

The following is from Vince Nicoletti and team photos courtesy of Cliff Gauthier.

Pat,

Here's some more picts and a short bio. The blog is sure growing! Cliff gave me some of the picts below and asked me to send the two team picts. The last pict is of me on a road trip to California. We stopped so we could do handstands in 4 states at once. Something that isn't as novel as I thought. (I'm going to post that one next to mine in the preceding post. Anybody else have photos of the 4 Corners?)

When I was in he eighth or ninth grade my gym teacher at Skinner Jr. High, Mr. Steve Hadley, was running the obligatory gymnastics unit and he noticed I could actually do some of the tricks he was asking everyone to do. He pulled me and some other guys out of the line and gave us individual help. I know we did an assembly with this group of nine fledgling gymnasts because I have 8mm movies. He also introduced us to Coach Kyle from North High. Most of the group went on to become gymnasts at North. Gymnastics was like heroin to us. We couldn’t get enough of it and Kyle routinely had to literally throw us out of the gym. I wound up at DU after Doug DeWitt recruited me for some reason. To say the team was unusual is an understatement. Team members described ourselves as the most unlikely group ever to claim to be a gymnastics team. It was really small. I remember being on a road trip in California where someone on the opposing team kind of sneered and asked me where the rest of our team was. I told him that this was it, we’re here. There was one DU gymnast at each event and a couple standing around. We were nearly invisible among the opposing team. It felt good beating them. Like all the gymnasts I knew, helping each other learn new tricks was second nature and I taught gymnastics in the DU age level classes. This led directly to at teaching degree. What else could you do with all those credit hours in art classes? Teaching jobs were hard to come by when I graduated in ‘71 and I had to substitute teach for two years. Finally I landed a teaching/coaching job at Gateway HS where I coached for five years. Pulling a team together out of nothing was a struggle. Gateway was brand new and so was coaching for me. After five years, I decided to quit trying to deny that the sport was losing ground and stopped coaching but, kept judging until the end. I enjoyed those years immensely! It was sad to see the sport wither and die here in Colorado. At one time it once was such a powerhouse. I continued to teach art classes at Gateway until I retired in 2005. During that time I divorced my first wife who was a gymnast from Lincoln High. One Friday night after being divorced and tired of sitting around doing nothing, I decided to go down to the Denver “Y” and see if anyone was still doing gymnastics. Well, the gymnasts were gone but the Imperial Flyers were still flying and I’ve been doing that ever since. (Check out the web site: http://imperialflyers.org) I met my current wife, Joan, flying trapeze one night and we now have two boys Marco and Luca, ages fourteen and twelve. The boys and I, all do gymnastics at the rec center near us three nights a week and Luca is doing tricks I didn’t learn until I got to college. He told me he set the goal of learning a double back on the tramp before he turned twelve and is proud to have met it. Retirement has been unbelievable. I’ve had time to do all sorts of things. When I’m not ferrying the boys around, maintaining the house or generally being Dad, I’m doing art related projects and teaching myself how to use video, photographic and music software.

I figure this must be the 69 DU team since Cliff would have been a senior and Vince a sophomore. And unfortunately they beat CU. See the following articles - I finally found my scrapbook this morning. I don't know who the really old guys on the right are but I think they have something to do with DU!