Last Dance

On a scale of 1-10, Amanda Castillo says the searing pain from her torn Achilles back on March 13, 2009 in Salt Lake City was “an 11.” Now dealing with pain and recovering from injuries is something elite level gymnasts learn to live with. About the only time they aren’t in some kind of pain is when they take a few weeks away from the gym or quit the sport completely, whichever comes first. When the injury first occurred, Castillo had no idea what had just happened but within moments after life had thrown her a bucket of lemons she was already contemplating how to turn it into lemonade.

“What just happened is the first question you ask yourself and then you can’t be there for your team [is next],” Castillo said Monday before the Florida Gators began practice for the NCAA Gymnastics Championships, which begin today at the Stephen C. O’Connell Center. “Something that you used to be able to control is out of your hands.”

Castillo could have used the moment to do a reasonably good impression of Nancy Kerrigan (“why meeeeeeee?????”), but instead of feeling sorry for herself or panicking that perhaps her gymnastics career had crashed and burned, she immediately began plotting her comeback. She had a senior season ahead of her and nothing was going to make her miss it.

A day later, Amanda Castillo’s plan to win was being implemented.

“I never thought it was all over but I just thought, how is the quickest way to come back?” she said. “That next day I was planning on ways of coming back, what I was going to do in the summer, when I was going to have my surgery, how I was going to do my rehab and how I was going to train.”

* * *

Before she could train again, she had to go through rather intense rehab. It is an injury that was once considered a career-ender, but even though athletes routinely come back from a torn Achilles these days, the comeback trail isn’t easy. It is a very long and often painful process that begins with learning how to walk normally again.

She made it through the rehab just fine. That might have been the easiest part.  Getting back into the gym after being away wasn’t difficult, either, but as she quickly discovered, she had to re-learn all her skills and learn also to trust her body once again.

“The hardest thing coming back was not being able to do my gymnastics at my full potential and I had to be really, really, really patient and it taught me a lot of patience,” she said. Where I was able to run and do a double pike on the floor, that wasn’t so easy for me anymore. It made me realize how hard gymnastics was. I have a new respect for the sport.”

During three All-American years at Florida prior to the injury, Amanda Castillo’s trademark was high voltage routines that she made look almost easy. Castillo and Melanie Sinclair were the Gators’ “Fearless Fleas,” tiny gymnasts (Castillo is listed at 4-11; Sinclair, who is no longer with the team after a shocking fall arrest on multiple charges, is 4-10) who seemed to explode off the floor when they made their tumbling runs.

Those tumbling runs that she could have done in her sleep a few months before began as tedious exercises.

“I’ve done this since I was five years old and so you forget because you’ve done it every single day,” she recalled. “When you’re set back in a situation like that, it’s just very humbling.”

Then there is that tendency to subconsciously favor the rebuilt part. When Castillo began working out in the gym again, without thinking she tried to compensate for her injury.

“When I first came back and started tumbling I would protect my injured leg,” she said, and then she wondered, “Could this happen again?”

Eventually, she put all the negatives out of her head and that’s when real progress began on the comeback trail.

“So many things go through your head,” she said. “You just have to find a way to organize it. You have to figure out what to throw away and what to keep. So that’s how I keep saying I learned a lot about myself.”

* * *

She has always been the consummate teammate and a crowd favorite. Teammates feed off her energy. Huge crowds at the O-Dome have jacked up the noise level to deafening proportions when Castillo leads cheers or dances to the music in the break between the balance beam and floor exercises. When she hurt her Achilles, Castillo had to learn to be a different kind of teammate.

“You find yourself having to find new roles on a team that I wasn’t used to,” she said.

Because she didn’t have time to regain all her strength or re-learn old routines and skills, Castillo had to give up the all-around. At full strength, she would have been considered a favorite to make the top ten nationally this season. Due to the injury, she was relegated to the uneven bars, which she insists “was kind of a blessing in disguise.”

She didn’t sulk but threw herself into this new role. That a senior All-American would relish a lesser role after three years of being a star, says a lot about Florida’s team chemistry. The only members of Rhonda Faehn’s Gators who participate in the all-around (all four events: vault, bars, beam and floor) are freshmen Ashanee Dickerson and Marissa King. Faehn has spread out the responsibilities for the other 16 routines among her team and it has paid off nicely.

“This team has a lot of heart and everybody is very close so we encourage each other to work at our peak level every single day,” Castillo said. “It is a fight for the spot in the lineup but it just shows the depth on this team.”

Depth had a lot to do with the Gators winning the Southeastern Conference and North Central Regional titles, but so did that ability to overcome adversity. In winning both meets, the Gators overcame some early adversity to finish strong. That finishing power has everything to do with Florida peaking at just the right time as they enter the NCAA championships. The Gators are seeded number two but they have the home gym advantage. Nobody would be surprised if they win their first NCAA title, especially Castillo.

“It would be huge,” she said. “It would be amazing. It would be everything I’ve hoped for, everything I’ve waited for, everything this team has worked for. This team has given it their all. I’ve never been part of a team that has so much heart and has been behind each other 100 percent of the way.”

The NCAA Championships is the last dance for Amanda Castillo. There is no pro gymnastics tour after college so when this meet is over, she becomes a civilian for the first time in her life. She will have challenges in the future, but gymnastics, and, in particular, this final year in gymnastics have prepared her for anything she will have to face in the future.

“It’s a great feeling to overcome adversity,” she said. “Adversity… at the end you know you can do about anything.”

Franz Beard
Back in January of 1969, the late, great Jack Hairston, then the sports editor of the Jacksonville Journal, called me on the phone one night and asked me if I wanted to work for him. I said yes. The entire interview took 30 seconds. It's my experience that whenever the interview lasts 30 seconds or less, I get the job. In the 48 years that I've been writing and getting paid for it, I've covered Super Bowls, World Series, NCAA basketball championships, BCS championship games, heavyweight title fights and what seems like thousands of college football, baseball and basketball games. I'm a columnist and special assignments editor for Gator Country once again, writing about the only team that ever mattered to me, the Florida Gators.