By Harper Chrisman
On August 6th, four days before school started, Elias Edwards, a junior at Louisville High School, was in Phoenix, Arizona for the 2026 Xfinity U.S. Gymnastics Championships. This is a national gymnastics competition that happens every year, with a long and difficult qualifying process.
Edwards said, “I was pretty excited, I didn’t think I was going to make it. I mean, I got a chance to go make national team.”
Most people start a sport young, but Edwards started extremely young. He has been doing gymnastics for about 14 years – since he was only 2 years old. His parents put him in gymnastics at this age because of his energy. He was always moving and getting into trouble, so they hoped he would burn some of that energy at the gym.
Edwards said, “I plan to try to get into a college gym, and from there, try to make the national team, and compete in the Olympics.”
Obviously, a step of this process is doing well in high school, and U.S. Championships is a big help. He had his normal competition year, leading him to state, then to regionals, then to nationals, where the top 16 athletes go on to compete in the U.S. Championships.
Mae Edwards, his sister and a freshman at Louisville, said “Even with anything besides gymnastics, he was always super competitive. When we’d do stuff at the house, he’d always want to win, even with board games.”
Edwards trains at a gym in Omaha, called ZnZ Gymnastics. He also coaches younger gymnasts at his gym. Every day he goes for about 4 hours for his own training, plus coaching time. This ends up amounting to at least 25 hours in the gym per week. Now, that’s already a lot. But after qualifying, Edwards had no time to rest.
He was in the gym all summer, practicing routines and sequences. He qualified for the all-around 16-year-old division, meaning he was doing floor exercises, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars, as well as the high bar.
Before the event, Edwards was interviewed by several news stations in Nebraska, as well as his gym. Sadly, he was unable to compete because of his injuries, ending up with four stress fractures in his hip.
Edwards says, “Training for this, it isn’t easy to stay healthy at the same time. I kind of overdid it a little bit, trying to push difficulty and lots of overuse.”