High-flying flips is the trick to keeping away bad feelings

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• JUDY WOODRUFF:

  Every summer, middle and high school teachers from around the country travel here to Washington, D.C., for the Student Reporting Labs teacher boot camp, in order to better understand what teaching broadcast journalism will look like in their classrooms.

  The educators shoot and edit character profiles.

  Tonight, we discover a young man who fights the demons in life through meditation and the kind of high-flying acrobatics seen in video games. It's an art form known as tricking.

  The video was shot and edited by teachers from Miami, Detroit and Aurora, Colorado.

• WILLIAM-THOMAS CONEYS, Mixed Martial Artist/Trainer:

  Tricking, to me, it's a lot of things. Mainly, it's a lifesaver.

  I was picked on as a kid from elementary up until the middle of high school. I really didn't have too many friends. Around the age of 15, 16, I lost my grandfather and my brother two months apart in the same year. And that sent me into a very, very sad, like, dark place for me. I just wouldn't talk to anybody. I was fed up with a lot of things.

  A couple of months afterwards, my mom put me into martial arts classes because she wanted me to be somewhere where I could express that freely without hurting myself or getting into trouble.

  Tricking is an artistic movement that spawned from the roots in martial arts, takes its form from gymnastics, dance, martial arts, and just about anything that you really can think of. We have taken video game moves and turned them into tricks.

  I'm an athlete. And just, physically from what we do, it's demanding, you know? And when it comes to tricking by itself, it's an art form, because it has structure, but no structure. When you trick, you paint the images in your head, sometimes before, sometimes after, sometimes while you're in the middle in the air.

  The biggest injury I had was when I crashed on my neck, and I got up, thought I was fine, walked about 10 feet, and then I was out cold. The doctor said that, had I been any higher in the air, I probably could have paralyzed myself from the neck down.

  You know, for me, tricking, it's a part of who I am as a person now. You know, not a day goes by where I don't think — where I don't think about tricking. Like, I know at a certain point, I'm probably going to have to sit down, someday. But, until then, I will be tricking.

  And even then, when I do have to stop, I will be teaching others how to trick or at least being able to give my knowledge on it to them. You know, tricking, for me, it's not just something that I do. It's a way of life. And I have come close to giving up on it a lot, just with injuries and other stuff that. But, at the end of the day, I always go back to it, because that's the one thing that keeps me going throughout everything.

  You know, bad days, good days, sad times, happy times, I can always count on tricking to give me that edge of peace.