ATHLETE
When my parents got sick and tired of me jumping and flipping on the couches of our home, instead of yelling at me to stop, they put me into gymnastics so I could learn how to flip correctly. At the age of three I fell in love with the sport of gymnastics immediately.
After putting 14 years of blood, sweat and focus into the sport of gymnastics, I was offered a scholarship to continue my athletic and academic endeavors at The Ohio State University.
My two and a half years at Ohio State have been some of the best years of my life. They have been full of growth and development, ups and downs, wins and losses. However, even with having a spectacular experience as a student athlete I felt that something was missing, and it wasn't till summer of 2022 that I figured out what that was.
ARTIST
Inspired by my Dad who is a professional musician I picked up the saxophone at the age of eight, so music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.
In 2016 I was accepted to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, where I was able to continue my music endeavors. At LACHSA I was the lead alto in the Big Band for three years, and even got a chance to play at the 40th Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl.
All throughout high school, I was told that I would have to choose between music or gymnastics, but I could never picture my life without either of them. But when it came time to go to college, I felt that I had to put the music to the side and focus solely on gymnastics, because I was told that doing both was too ambitious.
AMBITIOUS
In May of 2022, I realized that what was missing in my life was the music. Having both gymnastics and music in my life created balance, and when I pushed music to the wayside, I felt unbalanced. So I decided to pursue music once again but through a slightly different medium: music creation. In previous years music creation was just a hobby, now I felt that it could be more than that.
More Than A Hobby
Throughout the summer of 2022 I was constantly making music, and I stumbled upon a song that had been in my hard drive since 2019. It was only a track with no lyrics, but was a hard hitting, upbeat hip hop song with tons of potential. So I decided to write some lyrics to the song...
The Birth of HEAT
I finished the song in the later months of 2022. The songs speaks to the drive to be the best as an athlete and an artist. In addition, the song emphasizes how I could not have done it without my OSU Gymnastics team besides me. Their immense support and love for me, drives me to be the best version of myself that I could be, and HEAT is essentially a hype song for them. HEAT was the bridge between my athletic and artistic sides of me.
My Vision Becoming a Reality
Over the 2022 Winter Break, I teamed up with my teammate Kameron Nelson, who is well versed in the video creation world, and we shot a music video to HEAT. Due to time constraints we had three days to shoot, and had to wake up around 5:00 am all three days to get all the shots necessary. However we got it done and I was also able to pay homage to the OSU Men's Gym team by featuring a couple of my teammates in the video.
