Wildcats Mews

Welcome to the Wildcats news page. We will be posting here to share our progress and experiences.

The Latest update on Wildcats

Good News!

Hi Cats! We finally have some progress to report! We have signed the lease!!!!

We still have tons to do, but we are so exited that we had to tell y’all. We have put together a timeline for you, though please keep in mind that it is subject to change! 🙂

3/25/25

March, 16th Update!

Dear Families,

We are still working on the building lease. I know! How can this take so long? That’s what we are thinking too! We are currently planning on starting classes in May and will let you know if that timeline changes. In the meantime, a big thank you to those who have already sent in photos of our future students and their pets for our student photo board! We’ve also attached some fun coloring pages for the kids to print, color, and bring in with them after we open. These will be displayed on the lobby wall as well.

Thank you again for your continued support and patience. We can’t wait to welcome everyone soon!

Warmly,
The Wildcats Coaches

March, 1st Update!

Hi Everyone,
I had hoped to share a start date for our first session of classes by now, but unfortunately, we’re still in the middle of lease negotiations. I have a qualified and experienced professional team working on securing this lease for us. I hope and believe that it’s only a matter of time before we’re all happily bouncing around in our new den! Thank you so much for your continued patience and support as we work through this process.

In the meantime, please enjoy these silly cats to brighten your day. 🐾

Warmly,
Devon & The Wildcats Coaches

3/1/25

So, there is no guarantee, but we are in lease negotiations! Yay!! Our timeline is still very unclear, but at least we are moving forward toward leasing a specific building. The building is five to nineteen minutes drive away from the town centers of Falmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth, Freeport, Portland, Windham, Gray, Gorham, Westbrook, South Portland and Scarborough. It is between twenty and thirty minutes from the center of Casco, Raymond, Durham, Pownal, Brunswick, North Yarmouth, New Gloucester, Standish, Buxton, Saco and Cape Elizabeth. Needless to say we are very pleased with the location. 🙂 We are busily organizing our classes and activities. Some of you filled out our survey a while ago. Thank you! The information on it is very helpful as we aim to fill the needs and wants of our VIP, ie. you! If you have not filled out our survey, it would help us if you’d take a few minutes to give us your valuable input.

Thank You

2/7/25

Have a Happy Valentine’s day!

Coach Talon, 2004, Age 3

Update! 1/25/25

Hello Folks. We hope you are all doing well. As we mentioned in a previous email, everyone who registers in our first session of classes will be considered a Wildcats founder. Our founders will receive priority enrollment based on the date they joined our mailing list, a free open gym pass, and a certificate to back up your gymnast’s claim that he or she indeed started Wildcats Gymnastics. In addition to that, all founders will now be entered into a drawing to receive a free birthday party at Wildcats!

At this time you could do a couple things for us.

#1 You could take a picture of our future student or students with a pet! A stuffed animal will work if no pets are available. Please email this picture with the names of the gymnast and pet to [email protected] or you can just reply to this email. We plan on using these images to create a collage for our lobby.

#2 If you are emailing us anyway, and haven’t already given us your phone number, you could provide us with it. This will make it easier for us to get a hold of you when registration opens.

Thank you all for being an important part of Wildcats Gymnastics.

1/25/25

Update #1 2025

Hi Everybody, I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. I apologize for the lack of recent updates, but I really haven’t known what to say. I got the advice of multiple advisors and professionals and none of them predicted the difficulty involved in leasing a building for a gymnastics center. We are not giving up!! I have some upcoming meetings with some important people that hopefully will be able to help us. The other day, I jokingly threatened to ask all of you to march on the capital with us  Hehe. We could carry “We Want Wildcats!” signs and make a picket line! Seriously though, there are lots of buildings, we just haven’t been able to obtain one that meets all of the necessary criteria. We have come close with a couple of buildings and I have faith that it’s only a matter of time. We really appreciate you wonderful people and feel terrible about you having to wait. Please know we are doing everything we can think of to get into a building and get teaching. Ok, we haven’t started knocking on the doors of homes with barns asking, “Hey, will you lease us your barn?”…. Quick, hide your barn! Thank you all for tuning in.

Devon & The Wildcats Coaches

Jan 13

Coach Thane, The last day of school, 2021

Dear Friends of Wildcats,

We hope you are doing well and are enjoying, or at least tolerating, the strange winter weather. I’m sorry it has been so long since my last update. We have been diligently working to find a building and we have learned that there is a lot of competition for leased commercial property in Cumberland County Maine. We are committed to this project and will let you know when we have something to report. If anyone knows someone who might want to invest in a building they could lease to an awesome social enterprise, please let us know. 207 899 8015 We think we would be excellent tenants and should be in a position to buy the building or renew the lease after five years.

Thane (shown on left above) has moved to Maine and is working here with us in person now! Yay! That should improve our luck. It looks like only about a fifth of the people on our mailing list are reading our emails due to spam and promotion folders, so thank you so much for reading. We hope to have more exciting news soon.

Stay comfy and cozy

Dec 14

Dear Friends of Wildcats,

Please forgive us for spelling and grammar mistakes. We are really good teachers who fortunately teach Gymnastics, not English.

We are taking steps toward getting this building! Other people may be too, so cross your fingers for us. We believe our classes will be great! We have a wonderful combination of youthful enthusiasm, a lifetime of experience and a lot of care and commitment going into them. Class space may be limited, especially in the beginning. Families who enroll in our first session of classes will be considered our founders. Students enrolled in our first session will receive a free open gym pass and a certificate granting them the authority to tell everyone that they started Wildcats Gymnastics. We hope to give our founding families more and better perks in the future. Keep your eye on future Wildcats emails for an invitation to enroll, as you will have the option before the general public. Thanks for your support and patience.

11/12

Happy National Cat Day!

Really, October 29, is officially National Cat Day.

Ok everyone, keep your fingers crossed, but don’t hold your breath. We don’t want anyone fainting. We are going to look inside a building. There are a lot of steps to go through before actually looking at the building. We will tell you more as soon as we have something interesting to report.

Probably you know this by now, but Devon is out to prove that a business can be run primarily for the benefit of the community it serves, as opposed to primarily to make money. On that note, the Wildcats coaches can’t wait to get the financial aid and scholarship program up and running. They have some beloved and spoiled pet cats that they let have babies. All proceeds from the sale of the adorable fuzz-balls will go to the Wildcats Scholarship Fund. There are four kittens looking for new homes now. Please text Devon at 207-523-9829 if you are interested in an addition to your family.

Please keep suggesting to friends with potential students that they join our mailing list. It will be more fun for our students and infinitely beneficial to us to open with an already bustling program. Plus it means we will have the capacity to quickly add more fun and useful new equipment to our facility.

The Wildcats Crew.

Oct. 29

 

Hello Folks,

I hope you are all doing well. I wish I had something exciting to tell you about our facility. I have embarked on a mission to learn all I can about city code, particularly fire safety in the five towns we have targeted for our potential location. They are Falmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth, Portland and Freeport. Hopefully my efforts to find us a facility will become more productive once I have mastered city bureaucracy. 🙂 Or at least gained more knowledge about it. Thank you for all the support, encouragement and ideas many of you have given us. And now for a little levity, compliments of coach Thane and SNÖBAHN in Thornton Colorado.

Please do not worry, he will not be teaching this maneuver and he was unhurt.

Wildcats goes to The Cumberland Fair!

Hello Wildcats,

Hello everyone! We spent last week at the Cumberland fair. We saw some old friends and made some new ones. We also met an amazing hula hoop artist named Nettie Loops. You can check her out at https://www.nettieloops.com.

Some of you already know this, but just to be sure, we are calling Wildcats Gymnastics a social enterprise. In some ways we are operating like a non profit organization and in some ways we are operating like an employee owned business. On that note, as part of our team, your opinion counts, so please feel free to text or email us your thoughts and suggestions.

During the business start up process we have learned a lot, like search engine optimization is actually more important than what is on the website, for example. We have also jumped some big hurdles, like how to get pre approved for funding. Finding a den is proving to be a doozie, but we have some great people on the job. We will let you know as soon as we have anything interesting to report. We hope you are all having a wonderful fall and can’t wait to see you.

9/30

Howdy folks!

Just a quick update. We are still working hard to find a den. We have a couple of options on the horizon. Keep your fingers crossed for us! In the near future we will be sending you a survey. The purpose of which is to help us create a class schedule that will work well for you, our peeps! Please use it to let us know what you would like your children’s gymnastics center to do for you!

9/16

Music Festivities!

Hello! The Wildcats coaches hope you are all doing well! We are still working on finding a den. We’re learning a lot and making steady progress. Hopefully we will have some more exciting news soon! We went to music festivals in North Yarmouth and the Deering side of Portland last weekend and met some great kids that did gymnastics with us! Thanks Stacy, Olivia, Franny and Annabelle! Here are some pictures we hope you’ll enjoy. Thanks for all the good wishes and encouragement we have received! 🙂

                  “Monstah Love stickah.”                                                          “Yum!”                                                                   “ARRRRRRGH!!!”

Dear Friends of Wildcats,

We have been to lots of fairs and festivals now and met lots of folks from all over.  Thank you for joining our mailing list. If you are not on it yet and would like to be, please text or email your info to us and we will put you on it. 207-899-8015 or [email protected]. Make sure to remember the ME. The mews page gets most of our information, but the folks on the mailing list will be contacted first when we begin registering students. 

Hey Everyone! We are only one step away from funding! The next step is our den. Our website says we are in Falmouth for search engine optimization purposes, but we are actually open to any and all suggestions. If you know of a big building with some high ceilings, that someone would lease to a worthy cause, please let us know.

Now for a few more things the Wildcats coaches are planning.

A class for children participating in alternative schooling.

Don’t worry if you have long, regular school days. We will have plenty of classes for you too. When we contact you to enroll, if you have a flexible school schedule, ask about classes that start between 11:00 and 2:00. They probably come with a discount! 

A children’s anxiety support group.

Coach Devon is a BHP (behavioral health professional) and has personal experience with anxiety. She would like to host a gathering for kids and their close guardians to share management strategies, victories and solutions, and while we are in the gym anyway, exercise is one of those management strategies.

A trickers club.

Like tumbling, trickers focus mostly on floor. If you are interested in tricking, start with a tumbling class. If we get enough interest, maybe we could hold master classes with some of those amazing people we usually only see on TikTok and Instagram.

Private and semi-private classes.

If you want to do gymnastics, but can’t fit a regular class in your schedule, just want to learn cartwheels with a friend or for any other reason would like a private or semi-private lesson, we can help. Please note that private lessons are expensive. A semi-private lesson is a class with 2 or 3 students of similar, but not necessarily identical age and skill level. Semi-privates are more affordable than privates.  

We want to offer classes, activities, camps, and special events that will be a great benefit to you. If you have any advice or suggestions for us, as we create and fine tune our program, we would love to hear it. Please call or email us to share your needs and ideas.Wildcats is for you! Meow! I mean, Thank you all!

Sincerely, Devon

 

GOOD MEWS AND NOT SO GOOD MEWS

The good mews is the Wildcats coaches are really good at teaching gymnastics.  The not so good news is that they are not so good with software or search engine optimization.  For now we will input contact information for our mailing list manually. That means folks will need to call, text or email us with their name and email address and request we put them on the list. We apologize for the inadvertent hazing we have administered to many of you wonderful friends of Wildcats. If you have received this email, you are on our mailing list. For the folks we may have lost (I’m so sorry) we will post this on the Wildcats Mews page also. Between the mailing list debacle and the blatantly incorrect information that we can’t seem to change on our google business profile, you cats on our mailing list are like gold to us. We are so grateful to the folks who have been helping us get the word out about Wildcats. A huge, huge thank you to whomever posted information about us with the Cumberland school district. We are super excited to get the chance to serve our gymnastics community and we are honored that so many of you are supportive of our dream. 

To confirm, in spite of our google profile, we hope to be located in or near Falmouth and open fall of 2024. We want to be a blessing to Cumberland County so we would love to hear your advice, suggestions and ideas. The building we have in mind for Wildcats may require complicated and therefore expensive lease negotiations so we are open to other possibilities. We need at least 4,200 square feet and 2,300 square feet of that needs to have 18 foot or higher ceilings. It needs to have at least the rough ins for utilities so that there can be at least two bathroom stalls and parking for at least 25 cars. That is a lot of, “at leasts.” If anyone has any creative ideas, like a big, well built barn with a field beside it for example, please call or text us at 207-899-8015. In the meantime we will continue working toward the location we have been working on. While we confidently, if not patiently, wait for our funding, we would love to hear about what we can do for you. We are making plans for week long 2025 gymnastics summer camps with flexible daily start and end times to make things easier for working parents. If you have a clear opinion about something you would like your gymnastics center to offer, please email us and we will give it careful consideration. Thank you for being a very important part of the Wildcats Gymnastics adventure.  

July 30, 2024

Casco Days

Coaches Talon and Devon walked in the Casco Days parade on Saturday July 27th. We handed out stickers, met some great kids and then had delicious ice cream sodas at Scooping Good Times in Casco village. It was a very pleasant day. Thank you Casco. July 30, 2024

The Birth of a dream

July 1st Wildcats Gymnastics became an LLC and on July 19th the adventure really began. Coaches Devon and Talon wore informational posters like capes and handed out over 1,000 stickers to kids at the Yarmouth Clam Festival. They met some wonderful families and got a lot of exercise. Stay tuned as the adventure continues.

July 22 2024

Calamity at the clam Fest!

It was delightful to talk to so many wonderful kids and their families at the Yarmouth Clam Festival, but then, Oh No! Our computer system failed us! Ok, it is possible that there was human error involved. I prefer to blame it on a poltergeist curiously resembling a dog. We are cats, so….. anyway, If you gave us your contact information on July 19th or 20th via our website, we didn’t get it. Please ask any friends you know who might have joined our mailing list on July 19 or 20 to do it again. Or you can text or call us at 207-899-8015. Thank you to all the folks we met at the festival.

July 22 2024

Hunting for a den.

Hello friends of Wildcats Gymnastics. The Wildcats coaches are working hard to find a suitable den for our kittens, cats, wildcats and teams.  We are considering a space in West Falmouth.  Continue to check this Wildcats news page for up to date information on our progress. When we have a home, please consider joining the Wildcats Kids Club. The Wildcats Kids Club plans to host various events like the ones described below.

Ninja night – For ninjas 4 to 9 years old. An open gym style warm up followed by a ninja course around the whole gym. Also trampoline and games.

Parents Night Out –  You can leave your kids with us at Wildcats, confident that they will safely enjoy a wide variety of fun, healthy activities. These may include, but are not limited to, structured open gym, arts and crafts, dancing, games and healthy snacks.

Fortnight – No, not the video game! Join us for an open gym with a twist. Before the end of the evening we will all play together to build an equipment fort! Our creativity and safety, of course, are the only limits. 

Bring a friend night – A special open gym with various activities. This time you may bring an unregistered friend your age for free. Remember all participants must pre-register so we know how many are coming.

We will keep you posted on any progress we make regarding our den!

July 10 2024