When push comes to shove this week, it will be little Aria Rodli who gets the heave-ho.

Six-year-old gymnast Aria and more than 200 of her fellow bendable young athletes are the latest victims of California's budget crisis.

Their training program is being evicted from San Diego State University after 38 years – news that has hit the children so hard, it's as if someone had canceled rainbows, forever.

"She didn't quite comprehend why the gym would go away, and why everybody was crying," said Ann Collister, Aria's mother.

Collister understands how the budget food chain works and why that means closing the champion-producing Aztec Gymnastics on Saturday. But how to explain to Aria?

What happened was like the story of the old woman who swallowed a fly: After the new millennium came economic troubles, less money meant less taxes collected, leading to California owing $38 billion, leading to this current Darwinian budget-cutting frenzy that has spread the pain to virtually every department of state government, including $260 million in cuts to the California State University system.

Here, following the fly-swallowing gets a little complicated: San Diego State's share of that budget-cutting comes at the same time as record enrollment. Which means administrators need to do more with less to educate those 25,000-plus tuition-paying bodies. So they went hunting for more classroom space, including somewhere to build the university's largest classroom, a 500-seater, to maximize space and staff.

They found enough space for such a classroom in an old 1930s-era gym that holds the Department of Exercise and Nutritional Services. Which means bumping that department elsewhere – Peterson Gym. That means shifting what's in Peterson Gym now. And when the real-life game of musical chairs stopped, Aria got the heave-ho.

Last year, Aria's coach at the Coronado Rec Center told her parents she needed a more challenging gymnastics program, so they joined Aztec Gymnastics. San Diego State runs the hybrid program on campus. It offers for-credit gymnastics classes for SDSU students and training for local children, who pay market rate for their lessons, a portion of which goes back to the university.

Closing Aztec Gymnastics also puts its 10 coaches out of work and forces program founder and director Ed Franz into early retirement.

"It's unfortunate, but our first priority is the students of this university, that is what we are here for," said Provost Nancy Marlin, who approved the shuffle that resulted in the gymnastics eviction.

Jennifer Gilbert, being only 16, believed that if university officials understood how great Aztec Gymnastics was they would change their minds.

Gilbert wrote a passionate "Dear Administrator" letter explaining about their annual Cartwheel-a-Thon at La Jolla Shores raising money for charity. About how training over 20 hours a week and competing together forges deep ties between athletes.

"We get sweaty and chalky and sometimes there are tears," Jennifer wrote. "With Aztec Gymnastics closed a family will be torn apart."

Her plea won her two response letters from university officials, but nothing more.

"I was expecting they would say, 'We're sorry we'd like to help you this way or that, instead of "Sorry-goodbye,' " Jennifer said.

This weekend when the last balance beam gets carted out of Peterson Gym, what will be gone will not just be so many pony-tailed girls with gold-medal dreams.

As Franz said, "This will be the end of the entire sport of gymnastics at state."

Franz came in 1965 to run the men's varsity gymnastics team, and he soon added a women's competitive team. All physical education majors had to take gymnastics classes, so they could go on and teach gymnastics in schools that in those days required universal physical education.

Those were the days when Olympian Cathy Rigby, a Southern California girl, reigned as superstar, and Franz started an outreach program to train the next generation of gymnasts through the university.

Although gymnastics remains popular, San Diego State cut its intercollegiate gymnastics teams in the 1980s. The academic side of the program continued, though it no longer is required for majors.

Aria's father, Brian Rodli, tried to steer her into tennis, at which he excels, but he stopped after he saw her passion for gymnastics.

Rodli and Collister are working with other parents to find other quarters to re-launch the program as a private venture, which they believe can be self-sufficient if they can find a larger, more modern gym where they can include other athletic programs, such as cheerleading and dance.

"My daughter did 23 press handstands in a row. I'm not sure what they are, but I know they're hard to do. She came home, she was so proud," Rodli said. "You keep seeing these steps in their development as little people, we don't want to lose that."