Deadstik and Montague say it best.

Deadstik's post should be read and reread to all beginner pilots out there until they can say it word for word.

I too see many beginners that come out to the field shortly after they have soloed and go right into yanking the sticks around and then making an embarassing landing. In many cases, they end up destroying their plane. Instead of repairing or replacing it with another trainer, they go out and get an advanced plane. Soon after, thye've crashed that one too, and in most cases, shortly after that, you generally don't see them around too much.

As for the Alpha, I have much experience with it, as I have helped repair many of these with students, usually shortly after they solo. Yes, do indeed epoxy those wing halves together! Also, don't think that the Alpha trainer is robust by any means. What I have found out is some of them are, and some of them aren't. I've seen some from the inside that were built very well, and some that had missing glue joints, bad joins between balsa pieces, and in one case, the leading edge spar was spliced, and only held together with the top and bottom sheeting- no epoxy or CA on the splice at all! My point is this- if you decide to fly the Alpha hard, you may or may not get away with it, depending on what you do. Do yourself a favor and go out and buy a good intermediate trainer that is designed to do these moves.

But before anyone leaves the trainer scene, just make sure you can do the following:

Take off down the centerline of the runway, and depart on a straight line from the runway, climbing up to altitude, make a rectangular pattern (crosswind, downwind, base and final) keeping the pattern and altitude consistant and land down the centerline of the runway with a mains first landing (nose wheel touches after mains do). If you can do this with no wind, a headwind and a cross wind you have aquired the skills necessary for learning aerobatic manouvers. That's what I have my students do before I solo them (plus stalls, slow flight, etc).

That's what a trainer is for; to train you to fly. Asking anything more from it is asking it to do something it wasn't designed to do. Once you do these things well, you'll be miles ahead of anyone else who doesn't learn these skills.

This is not to say that you shouldn't do aerobatics with your trainer. If you still don't get it, reread the posts above until you do- i don't think you can say it better than what was said here.