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CAMAS — Sometimes, the way a journey begins leads to unexpected destinations. Randy Fox’s first step toward a gymnastics hall of fame started by chance one afternoon at a gym in Lufkin, Texas, when his younger sister needed a spotter.

“She told me, ‘Just don’t let me fall on my head,’ ” Fox recalled.

He didn’t. And then a line formed as other children looked for a coach’s helping hand.

Decades later and a continent away, young gymnasts still line up for assistance from Fox. For the past decade, he has been coach and co-owner at Vancouver Elite Gymnastics Academy.

In June, Fox was inducted into the USA Gymnastics Region 8 Hall of Fame. Region 8 includes eight states in the Southeastern United States.

“It was a total shock,” Fox said. “I actually thought they had somebody else named Randy Fox” to induct.

Fox, 56, made a name for himself while coaching gymnasts of all ages in a variety of places. He was 16 when he took up the sport, but was able to compete for one season at Louisiana State University before turning to full-time coaching.

His coaching mentors included 1964 Olympic gymnast Armando Vega and Hall of Fame coach Vannie Edwards, who guided several United States women’s gymnastics Olympic teams.

Among the elite gymnasts Fox coached before they became national champions were Kristie Phillips, Shannon Miller, Brandy Johnson and Lucy Wener.

Fox was nominated for the regional Hall of Fame by Phillips and Wener. Phillips was a national all-around champion in 1986 and 1987 who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated at age 14. Wener was a three-time NCAA bars champion, and the first college athlete to score a perfect 10.

“He laid the foundation for my entire career in gymnastics,” Phillips said.

Phillips — now a gym owner and coach in North Carolina — remembers Fox as a “patient and understanding instructor” who taught with a smile and made the effort to help Phillips and her young teammates enjoy childhood despite spending a lot of time away from family and friends.

“The bottom line is, the coach forgets sometimes how much impact they have on an athlete’s life,” Phillips said. “He was always there to encourage us.”

Building confidence, Fox said, is the best way a coach can help a young athlete.

“I tried not to put any pressure on them at all,” said Fox, who worked with elite-level gymnasts at several gyms in the Southeast. “The last thing they needed was pressure from me.”

When young gymnasts he coached turned into national champions and Olympians, Fox said, his emotions were those of a proud father. But coaching elite gymnasts wasn’t his dream.

“I wasn’t into it, to be honest with you,” he said of the high-intensity world of elite gymnastics.

Fox said his focus was always on helping young athletes experience joy from gymnastics. “Gymnastics is just a tool to help kids learn life lessons,” Fox said.

Fox’s own competitive career started after he watched his high school’s mascot do a tumbling run the length of the gym. He and the boy in the costume formed their own two-person gymnastics team, training on their own except for weekly 80-mile trips to train with Rudy Magdaleno, a Texas gymnastics hall of fame coach.

His competitive career started with a crash landing into a judging table on his first vault warm-up run and ended at Louisiana State, where he competed for one season before becoming an assistant coach.

If Fox hadn’t discovered his passion for gymnastics, he might be an engineer or architect. He is an inventor who confesses to having countless ideas for products that he never gets around to completing.

Thanks to his creativity, his recent recognition isn’t his first brush with a hall of fame for Fox. The National Wrestling Hall of Fame and Museum includes one of Fox’s creations. In 1999, he designed and sculpted the trophy for the Schalles Award, which recognizes the college wrestler with the most pins during a season. He also created scaled-down replicas of NASA spaceships and astronauts that are still sold in museum gift shops.

The Schalles trophy was his final project as a sculptor.

“I felt like, ‘Been there, done that,’ ” he said.

The next stop for Fox was the Bahamas, where for four years he was the head coach at Nassau Gymnastics.

Alex Sturrup and Lucien Seymour, two gymnasts who were coached by Fox as teenagers in the Bahamas, visited their former coach last summer.

“He always finds a way to give you confidence and hope” while also challenging you to do better, Sturrup said. “It’s not so much that he pushes you, he makes you want to push yourself.”

“On every level, he’s given me insights about life,” Seymour, now a stunt man and gymnastics coach, said.

After his time in the Bahamas, Fox relocated to Southwest Washington. VEGA began as a business in 2003, co-founded by Fox and Bulgarian national champion and Olympic team member Zdravko Stoianov with investors Marty and Candace Miller.

They began with 10 gymnasts and limited gym time at Prairie High School.

A former National Guard Armory building has been VEGA’s home for a decade. In the fall of 2014, a second location opened in downtown Camas. The space was needed to continue to grow a business that now serves more than 1,600 students in gymnastics, dance, music, cheerleading and preschool programs.

More than 200 competitive gymnasts now train at VEGA, and the gym has teams at several competitive levels.

After four decades in gymnastics, Fox is not ready to step away. He marvels that beginning gymnasts now perform skills that were introduced by gymnasts 20 and 30 years ago. His enthusiasm for gymnastics sounds as strong now as it must have been 40 years ago.

He smiles as he tells of a young gymnast who recently asked him if he has a job.

“I don’t call it work,” Fox said. “How many people have a job where they can bounce on a trampoline?”