By Abigail Wright
NKyTribune reporter
Four words stretch across the sisters’ matching T-shirts in bold lettering: “BE HAPPY. SHINE BRIGHT.”
For sisters and Erlanger natives, Courtney Hunt and Emily Scheyer, the phrase is more than a slogan. It became a personal mantra, a line in a children’s book and ultimately the guiding philosophy behind Cartwheel Creators, the business they launched in 2024 to help young gymnasts develop not only stronger skills, but stronger confidence.
Whether through picture books, chapter books, activity guides or online programs, the sisters hope every child who encounters their work learns the same lesson they’ve spent decades teaching inside the gym: believing in yourself is often the hardest skill to master.
“That was the phrase that got me through the entire year,” Emily said. “I had a lot of anxiety and a lot of self-doubt, and I would constantly be sliding down that negative slope. And I was like, it’s okay. All I have to do is be happy and shine bright and good things will come, better things will happen.”
The signature slogan eventually found its way into “The Floor Fairies,” the sisters’ first chapter book, where the main character repeats the affirmation to herself.
Gymnastics first entered the sisters’ lives when 9-year-old Courtney watched the 1984 Olympics and became mesmerized by the athletes flying across the screen. Inspired, she immediately began teaching her 2-year-old sister, Emily, the flips and tumbles she had just seen.
“She (Emily) was 2 and so I started flipping her around,” Courtney said. “And for some reason, I just had a natural ability to teach and know what things were called and kind of how to do them.”
With Courtney coaching, Emily could perform 10 back handsprings in a row by the age of 4.
“She was a natural gymnast, and I was a natural teacher,” Courtney said.
When the sisters were 12 and 4, they visited the local gymnastics gym where Emily was invited to join the pre-team, and Courtney was offered a job, marking the beginning of careers that have now spanned decades.
Emily competed throughout her childhood before eventually joining her older sister as a coach. The sisters coached together at Northern Kentucky Gymnastics before it became Top Flight Gymnastics, where Emily continues coaching competitive gymnasts between the ages of 10 and 18.
Courtney no longer coaches regularly but remains deeply involved in gymnastics education through Cartwheel Creators.
Over the years, they’ve coached all ages from infants experiencing movement for the first time to adults pursuing gymnastics later in life.
For Courtney, the greatest reward wasn’t producing champions; it was watching children discover confidence.
“Really building confidence and helping the ones that weren’t naturally talented, showing them that they can do these things and help them believe in themselves more,” Courtney said.
For Emily, coaching has revealed that gymnastics is as much mental as it is physical.
“There’s a lot of mental blocks that come with it (gymnastics),” Emily said. “So helping them (gymnasts) work through the fear and believe that they really can do it, they’re gonna be okay. And competing, which is a whole other thing, of how to control your breathing, believe in yourself, get up there, and do it by yourself in front of everybody.”
Those lessons eventually inspired a business.
While coaching gymnastics, the sisters started a dance program offering tap, ballet and jazz classes. They grew enrollment from zero to 120 dancers, but eventually realized they could only reach the families who lived close enough to attend.
“We really wanted to branch out, and that’s when we really started to look into more entrepreneurial stuff and things like that,” Courtney said.
They officially launched Cartwheel Creators in 2024 with a mission to combine gymnastics instruction with children’s literature and educational resources.
According to the sisters, the goal of Cartwheel Creators is to help children build confidence, resilience, kindness, perseverance, and a love for movement while encouraging families to spend time reading, learning and being active together.
Their first projects included the preschool books “Animal Gymnastics ABC’s” and “The Secret of Magicstix.” They later expanded into coloring books, activity books, guided journals and digital programs.
Then came a new challenge: The competitive gymnasts Emily coached asked her for stories written specifically for kids like them.
“I was actually at a competition,” Emily said. “One of the coaches was sitting under the vault table, and I was watching the kids go over the vault table, and I was like, ‘You’re like a vault troll under there.’ And that sparked the whole conversation of a vault troll and floor fairies, so that’s originally where it came from.”
The result was “The Floor Fairies,” the first installment in “The Secret Gym” chapter book series, published in December 2025.
Emily, who had always had a talent for writing, wrote the story while the young athletes she coached became her first editors, taking home chapters and returning them with handwritten notes and suggestions.
According to the Cartwheel Creators website, the story centers on positive self-talk and how encouraging thoughts help confidence grow, while negative thoughts create doubt.
Its sequel, “The Vault Troll,” will focus on overcoming fear in the face of challenge.
The themes reflect challenges the sisters see every day inside the gym.
“One thing that we notice, all coaches notice, is how much the kids say, ‘I can’t do that. It’s too hard.’ It’s like they’re programmed to not believe that they can do new things. And so I think that’s where we come in,” Courtney said. “In everything we do, we’re teaching positive reinforcement and changing your thoughts and things like that, which is really needed in these kids.”
While Emily writes, Courtney illustrates the books using generative artificial intelligence as a starting point before extensively editing each image herself.
“Since we know exactly what the positions are supposed to look like, quickly we learned that AI has no training in gymnastics at all. So, they (AI) can kind of give me a basic starting point, and then it’s a lot of editing,” Courtney said. “We make a conscious effort to make sure that all the positions, all the lines, all the everything is correct gymnastics because we know correct gymnastics.”
Their work continues to evolve every day.
Emily is focused primarily on expanding “The Secret Gym” series, with three additional books in the works, while Courtney continues developing online educational programs.
Among their future projects is a Movement Mentor program, a junior leadership initiative designed to encourage children to become ambassadors for healthy lifestyles by organizing activities that bring families together and away from screens.
“Kids are more able than people give them credit for,” Courtney said.
The sisters also hope their entrepreneurial journey encourages children to think more creatively about their futures.
“So many kids are brought up that you go to school, you go to college, you work 9 to 5 for a living. And the whole entrepreneur thing is not really cultivated,” Courtney said. “People have different talents that they can grow and make money from.”
For the sisters, creating a business with gymnastics at its core always felt inevitable.
“We love it (gymnastics) so much, and we’ve tried doing other entrepreneurial things to make money, and we always come back to gymnastics. We know it, we love it and we can inspire so many people,” Emily said.
That inspiration traces back to countless moments inside the gym, where children accomplished skills they once believed were impossible.
“I remember she (Courtney) would be coaching kids and how they would light up when they would get a new skill, or she would convince them to believe in themselves and then they did it, and they were like, ‘I can do it.’ And they had that pride just bursting out of them,” Emily said.
Today, the sisters hope those same moments happen far beyond the gym floor.
Through books, online programs and stories that pair cartwheels with confidence, they are trying to teach life lessons that extend far beyond gymnastics.
“I think just overall, that’s what we want to spread into the world is kindness and confidence and perseverance,” Emily said. “And I think starting with like the self-talk and little lessons like that, that can go to learning how to drive, that can go to a job interview, you know, take a deep breath, say your affirmations, believe in yourself.”