About
Cameron Gamble
Power · Slow Flow · Yin · Meditation
Dallas, TX
I was a kicker who did yoga to stay sharp. Now I am a teacher who used to kick.
Flower Mound, 2010 to 2014
I became a kicker by accident
I went to Flower Mound High School from 2010 to 2014, and I was a soccer player first. I played for the school and for the Dallas Texans, and the only reason I ever kicked a football was logistics. I wanted to play both sports, and the school would only allow it if I signed up for the soccer class and then came back after the last bell to kick. So I did both. I just never planned on the second one.
Yoga came in through that same side entrance. A coach at a kicking camp told me it would keep me focused, help me regulate my emotions in a hostile stadium, and make me more flexible. He made it sound like it was built for kickers, so I treated it the way I treated everything back then, as training. Thirty minutes of stretching every morning, muscle memory drills at night, long passive holds on the living room floor while the TV ran.
For a while that was all it was. Then one afternoon I walked into an actual studio, a small place on the corner of Sagebrush and Long Prairie, and I felt completely out of place. I was sixteen, suspicious, and fairly sure everyone in the room could tell. I stayed anyway. I only took Yin. The flowing classes looked like a lot of effort for something that was supposed to be recovery.
What kept me coming back caught me off guard. It was not my hips loosening up. It was the stillness at the end, and the attention that came with it. For the first time I could watch my own thoughts instead of getting dragged around by them. I got steadier. Calmer. A little harder to rattle, which turns out to be a useful quality when your job is to kick in front of a stadium that wants you to miss.
I did not understand how much of me was built on that quiet until the day I walked away from it.
LSU, 2014 to 2018
I learned to stand in the pressure
Football took me to Baton Rouge on a full ride. I kicked at LSU for four years, number 36, and studied computer science and math in the hours I was not on a field. It was the highest level I had ever played, and the thing no one warns you about up there is how quiet it gets right before everything depends on you.
People assume Alabama was our rival, because that is the game that makes television. It was not. Florida was. And the worst place to learn that is Gainesville, where the sideline is so narrow you are practically standing in the front row, and the front row wants you dead. My freshman year we walked into that noise and beat them 30 to 27, on a field goal from one of my older teammates, the kind of kick where ninety thousand people are begging you to choke and you have to pretend you cannot hear them.
Afterward I asked him how he handled the pressure, hoping for a trick I could borrow. He told me it never goes away. You just get used to it.
It never goes away. You just get used to it.
That was the most useful thing anyone told me in college. I had spent years trying to make the nerves disappear. He was telling me the job was not to kill the pressure but to stand inside it, which was the same thing Yin had been teaching me on the floor of that little studio, only louder.
Which is what makes the next part strange. This is exactly where I let the practice go. Around my junior year everything came due at once, the schedule, the workouts, the exhaustion, my own head. LSU stopped running the yoga classes we used to get, and the studio they sent us to only taught Yogalates, no Yin, nothing I recognized. So I stopped. I told myself it was temporary.
It was not temporary.
After football
The part I do not have a clean story for
When football ended, the structure that had run my whole life ended with it. No season. No schedule. No team. A lot of open time, and a degree I did not finish.
I chased the NFL the way you chase something you already suspect is gone. Two pro kicking camps. Neither went well. I started a business that folded before I could see it through.
Then came a few years I do not have a clean story for. I moved back home for six months, moved back out, and spent another six in a worse place than where I started. I did a lot of therapy. I was not practicing. I was not still. I was just getting through the days.
What pulled me out was not dramatic. An apartment. An internship. Slow, ordinary work as a software developer. One reasonable decision after another, for about five years, until I almost felt like myself again.
Almost.
July 2024
I could not keep breaking myself for sports
The injury had been waiting for me since college. I hurt my SI joint my junior year and then nursed it badly for years, the way you ignore a warning light because the car still runs. In July of 2024 it finally collected. I was stretching, heard a loud pop in my hip, and felt something cold run up my spine. By that Saturday the muscle around it felt like it was shredding.
I rehabbed it. Then, because I apparently learn slowly, I went back to soccer and rolled my ankle almost immediately. Sitting there hurt again, I finally did the math. I could not keep breaking my body for sports that were never going to love me back.
So I went back to the one thing that ever actually made me better. I remembered what yoga had done for me at sixteen, and over the years a handful of people had told me I should teach it. I do not do things halfway, so I did not just start practicing again. I went and learned it, properly.
I expected to come out of all that with knowledge. I did not expect to come out of it loving the teaching itself, the part where you help someone find the thing you nearly lost. That caught me off guard more than the injury did.
Dallas, now
What I try to pass on
I teach at Gaia Flow Yoga in Dallas, the studio where I trained, plus private sessions. Power Vinyasa, Slow Vinyasa, Yin, and Meditation. The whole range, from sweating through a strong flow to lying still long enough to actually hear yourself think.
I teach the way the practice reached me, which was slowly and without a sales pitch. I am not here to sell anyone a transformation. I am here to help people pay attention. A few things I keep coming back to:
