A natural gymnast

Porscha Rotty, eight year old Mornington resident and a Year 3 student at Wesley College’s St Kilda Road campus, has been doing gymnastics since she was just four years old. “She was always flinging herself on furniture and begging me to take her to a gymnastics class,” her mum Jacqui recalls. At the age of four, Porscha began gymnastics at Peninsula Gymnastics, but moved to the Mornington Youth club a year later. 

At six years of age, a talent scout spotted her at a National Level 1 competition and asked her to try out for the Victorian Women’s High Performance Centre (VWHPC), a centre for elite athletes with the focus being on producing Olympians. She was fortunate enough to be offered a place, and has been there ever since, training some 27 hours a week.

Although she regards vault as her favourite and also her best apparatus, Porscha has been excelling in all apparatus. This year, she scored a near perfect 15.9/16 on vault at the VWHPC challenge, and was one of the youngest gymnasts to be selected to go to her first national camp at the Australian Institute of Sport in July.

With her gruelling training schedule, it means that Porscha misses out some of the fun that a normal nine year girl loves like birthday parties. However, she loves gymnastics so much that she doesn’t see the things she misses, such as training all through the school holidays, as sacrifices. Porscha’s mum credits Wesley staff member, James Skehan, with helping Porshca stay on track with her school work.

Porscha considers Nastia Liukin, Russian-American gymnast, as her sporting idol “I want to be like her” – Wesley believes that Porscha is well on her way to achieving this!