Norwich — Kevin Portofee was a happy 6-year-old playing baseball and soccer when his mom dragged him to the gymnastics class she was teaching at Thames Valley Gymnastics and urged him to sign up for a class because he might like it.

So he signed up.

“It was all girls,” Portofee said. “I said ‘I don’t want to do this! I don’t want to be in a class full of girls.’”

But his mother, Susan Portofee, and other coaches noticed something immediately about young Kevin, and urged him to continue. When he was 8, a new coach arrived at Thames Valley and started a boys’ gymnastics class. His coach gave out Sour Patch Kids candies when the boys did their routines just right.

“You know,” he recalled last week. “When I wanted those Sour Patch Kids, I got 'em.”

Kevin Portofee hasn’t been out of the gym since. By age 10 as a Level 4 gymnast, he won his first state championship, competing in the combined events of pommel horse, vault, steel rings, parallel bars, horizontal bars and floor exercise.

The next year, he advanced to Level 5, and quickly reached Level 6. He skipped Level 7, and by 2015, Portofee was competing in national championships as a Level 9 athlete in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Now age 16 and a junior at Norwich Free Academy, Portofee has reached the highest skill Level 10. He spent much of last week’s April vacation at Thames Valley Gymnastics new facility in Franklin training for the national championships May 4-8 in Battle Creek, Mich., and a chance to make the U.S. Junior Olympics team.

He got that chance along with six others from New England by winning first place in the Connecticut championships this spring, and two weeks ago placing fourth overall in the New England regional championships.

If he succeeds there, he would move onto competition this summer for a spot on the Junior Olympics team and training in Colorado with the 2016 U.S. Olympics gymnastics team heading to Rio. The minimum age for the men’s gymnastics team is 18, so Portofee has his sights set forward to the 2020 games in Japan.

“Kevin is a phenomenal gymnast,” said Eric Flugum, Portofee’s coach for nearly five years, “one of the best I’ve had. He has a positive effect on all the other boys.”

Flugum watched from the sidelines during a five-hour training session last week at Thames Valley Gymnastics. Portofee and several other boys took turns at the steel rings, vault, high bar and other events. Flugum shouted brief instructions and encouragement as Portofee swung around the high bar, let go, twisted and grabbed the bar in the reverse direction.

Mostly, Flugum said, Portofee needs to perfect technique, to make sure his body at correct angles, legs together and head straight and his landings balanced. They have worked at bringing more difficult skill elements into Portofee’s routines and then practicing them to the point where they look effortless, Flugum said.

“He works hard at making his routines stand out,” Flugum said. “His routines are clean. He know what he wants to do and works hard to do it.”

His mother, a former gymnast and a girls’ gymnastics coach, stood at the sidelines watching Portofee spin around the high bar. She remained calm as he spun and twisted, shouting her own words of encouragement. She has come to know his every movement.

“I can usually tell when something is going wrong,” she said.

Something went terribly wrong during a competition in February in Colorado. Portofee said he got too close to the bar after a release, but thought he could recover and catch the bar. He fell hard, his feet slipped and his head slammed against the base mat.

“I opened my eyes and the lights hurt,” he said.

When he didn’t get up, his mother was scared, but she remembered his plea to her.

“He would say to me ‘please don’t be one of those moms who runs down to the floor freaking out,’” she recalled. “I didn’t. I sucked it up.”

Nurses raced to his side and helped him. When the family got home, they went to a concussion specialist called HeadZone in Shelton for treatment. He was sidelined for a month before returning to the gym and the high bar.

“The first two meets back were a little rough,” Portofee said.

The third meet was the state championships, where he placed first in every event except high bar. He was second in that, and had the best all-around score.

It wasn’t just gymnastics that suffered a setback. Portofee still had schoolwork to do. With a goal of obtaining a Division 1 college scholarship – his short list has Penn State, the University of Illinois and the College of William & Mary – Portofee knows he has to keep his grades up.

“NFA was great,” he said, “making sure my head was OK before I got back into it.”

NFA doesn’t have a varsity men’s gymnastics team, but there’s also a chance that Portofee can wear the Red and White in competitions during his senior year. Flugum said a rules change allows a high school without a varsity team to review a gymnast’s credentials and declare him to be a varsity athlete. Portofee, his parents and coach plan to petition NFA for such a designation at the start of his senior year.

Portofee said he is considering studying psychology and economics, two seemingly disparate fields, but not so much in Portofee’s mind.

“I’d really like to coach, so psychology would be helpful,” he said, “and if I ever want to own a gym, economics would really help.”

c.bessette@theday.com