Step back, for a second, from that near-perfect vault that Courtney Gladys just performed.
Forget about the 82 feet that just disappeared in front of her. Ignore how she thrusts herself into the floor, and, in defiance of her surgically repaired elbow, launches herself back into the air with her chalky hands.
Don’t bother with the back flip she springs into; or how she finds her hands again and uses them to shoot back into the air, her body a tight spiral, turning her parallel to the ground, now perpendicular, parallel, and perpendicular and parallel again to land.
So what if she sticks the landing? So what if it’s her season-high score, a near-perfect 9.90? Her teammates surround her and embrace her, and she is truly happy in this moment.
Forget that too. Courtney does. By the time their bodies disconnect, she is disconnected from the moment. She’s thinking about how her spring could have been stronger, her spiral tighter, her landing straighter. She’s thinking about the beam she’ll be whirling around in the next event.
When she climbs the podium later that night to collect her first-place flowers for the vault, she isn’t thinking about how her remarkable comeback is complete. And she doesn’t think about it when she climbs to that same spot again, moments later, to collect her bouquet for her first-place finish on the beam.
Seven years ago, Courtney wasn’t even competing in gymnastics.
Four years ago, her only goal was to rebuild that elbow that had forced her out of the sport that defined her. Three years ago, her goal was to compete on vault and beam. Two years ago, her goal was to be an all-arounder again. In this, her senior season, her goal was to give gymnastics her all before graduating.
The NCAA Gymnastics Championships are her second chance to say so long to gymnastics — and her last.
***
This sport takes you and shapes you when you’re young. For Courtney, gymnastics started around the age of five. Her dad, Barry Gladys, saw in her an energy that couldn’t — or from a parent’s perspective, shouldn’t — be contained in the four walls of the living room, where she spent her time diving off couches and chairs.
There in West Palm Beach, he enrolled his daughter in “Mommy and me” and other basic tumbling classes. On the cushioned floor and the little stairs, she started developing her eye and foot coordination.
He won’t say why now, but before Courtney turned seven, Barry Gladys decided to divorce his wife and gained full custody of Courtney. He transferred to Orlando, and there she adjusted to two new families — one without her mom and one at Orlando Metro Gym.
Those weekly classes she was in started to spread through the rest of the week. The goals were easy to see back then: when she was at Level 1, she wanted to advance to Level 2. When she got to Level 3, Level 4 was all she could think about it. After school, there was practice. After practice, homework. After homework, sleep.
The routine sounds repetitive, but it sustained Courtney.
“I couldn’t wait to get to the gym every day,” she says now. “It just never got old. It can’t. There’s always so much to work on — strength, grace, flexibility. I loved everything about it.”
By the time she turned 12, she was in private school so that she could leave school every day by 1:30 p.m. and head to the gym for six hours of practice.
She had already progressed through the numbered levels and become a National Elite competitor. So she and her dad crisscrossed the country, hopping planes to Texas every other month; and, in between, to Atlanta, Colorado Springs, Chicago and New York for meets.
For Courtney, the trips were opportunities to compete and to see the country, even if she never really went outside of the airport and the gym. For Barry, they were an opportunity to spend time with his daughter — maybe to slow down how quickly kids grow up.
One of Courtney’s biggest events took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she competed in the junior division of the U.S. Classic. Courtney finished first.
Barry only remembers one time in her career before the elbow injury when she didn’t end up on the podium for a top-three finish after a meet. But for Barry, this meet was special. This meet meant that maybe Courtney could earn a college scholarship at a big-time program.
The next night, in the same auditorium, some of the younger gymnasts saw Courtney and asked her for her autograph. But Courtney didn’t relish in those five minutes of fame. Her focus is always on the future.
Her eyes that night were on some of the older gymnasts. She turned to her dad during the night and revealed her next goal. This one involved skipping a few steps.
She wanted to be an Olympian.
***
Courtney never made it to the Olympics.
Before she turned 14, she had made it to the International Elite level, which meant more practice and more traveling and less of everything else.
But her elbow wasn’t willing to let her finish the journey. After almost 10 years of silent submission to abuse, it finally retaliated. First there was the dull pain after practice. Then there was the sharper pain that stuck around for a while.
Then, one practice, she felt it crack. Her coaches told her to rest and ice it, but Courtney knew ice and Advil were no longer enough. She went and saw a physician who gave her two unappealing options: surgery or sitting out for year.
She took three weeks to decide.
The doctor gave her a soft cast and a prescription to sit out for at least eight months. After eight months, she attempted her first comeback, but the elbow still hadn’t healed.
She decided to leave the sport for good.
The break was nice for the first month. She needed it. She finally discovered free time. She could come home and log onto AOL Instant Messenger or watch TV. It’s a funny thing, though. More time doesn’t always mean that you get more done.
Courtney soon found herself studying just as late as she used to, but without the good excuse of gymnastics. Her grades took a little dip, and she started realizing that gymnastics taught her more than just tumbles and tight landings. The sport had taught her responsibility and time management.
“I loved the thrill of the next thing,” she says now. “There wasn’t that next thing there anymore. There was nothing there.”
For Barry, who was part of the last generation of West Virginia students to work in the steel mills to pay his tuition, the answer was obvious — Courtney needed to find a new sport. She took to track and made varsity in her freshman year as a sprinter. Her coaches tried to put her in pole vaulting because it just seemed to make sense. It remains to this day the only sport at which Courtney has tried without measurable success.
So her dad enrolled her in tennis. She took private lessons. One day after a practice, her coach told her dad something obvious — that Courtney had great athletic ability. He followed it with something unexpected — that if she stayed with the sport, she could be a top-five player in the southeast before she went to college.
She poured herself into her studies after she met with an advisor who turned his computer monitor toward her and showed her where she needed her test scores to be if she wanted to be a Gator, which had been a goal of hers since she was seven.
She volunteered at a retirement home, and discovered that tired cliché that you go to serve others, but instead find yourself being served. Like the lady from Virginia who kept her grounded when she was still devastated about leaving gymnastics. “There’s so much else in the world,” she told Courtney.
Courtney could see that now.
She met more friends than ever at Lake Highland Prep, but she never forgot about her family at the gym.
Courtney always planned to return to gymnastics, but she never planned a particular date. One day in her senior year, her friend Christine Girard asked her in class, “Why don’t you get back into gymnastics?”
It’s a question Courtney had asked herself a thousand times, but it sounded nice with someone else’s voice. Courtney went straight from school to her dad’s office and said, “Dad, I’d like to go back and do gym again.”
Dads see this kind of stuff coming. “You’re old enough now, and you can make your own decisions,” he told her. “Is your heart in it?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Then go for it, Court.”
***
Four years ago, Florida gymnastics coach Rhonda Faehn answered a phone call from her old friend Jeff Wood, the owner of Orlando Metro Gym.
“You trust me, right?” Wood asked her.
“Of course,” Faehn said.
For years, Wood’s gym has fed players into Florida’s program, so Faehn trusted Wood’s assessment of gymnasts. This girl was different, he told her. She had been out of the sport for three years. He was confident that she would get back, though. Confident that if Faehn gave Courtney Gladys this opportunity, Faehn wouldn’t regret it.
He didn’t tell her that when Courtney first told him she wanted to get back that he had a little chuckle. He noticed a decline in his gymnasts during their one month off every summer. How does a girl who has been gone for three years come back?
But there was something about Courtney, something everyone sees in her. There is nothing that she won’t do to accomplish her goals. When he used to coach her, Wood would sometimes ask his gymnasts to do 200 pushups after a six-hour practice. Other girls rolled their eyes. Courtney didn’t blink. She just did it.
He remembered that girl. This one was different, though. This one still had all the fight, but she was missing something. What was it?
The pressure.
Sure, Courtney had some critics. Who would believe that she could do this? But they were easy to tune out. Before, Courtney could never think about life outside of gymnastics, now she just thought it would be nice to get back into the sport. If she couldn’t, she knew there would be something else out there for her.
It wasn’t a surprise then, when she started climbing ropes and sprinting on the treadmill, looking like she’d never left. She started physical therapy for two hours every day. When those muscles were strong enough again, they started to remember the basic skills. She started on the floor again. Then she moved to the vault. The bars didn’t come back for a while, but that was okay.
What came back too soon was the pain in her elbow. She saw a doctor again, and this time arthroscopic surgery was the only solution. She was planning to walk on to Florida’s team in the fall, and it was already February. She needed six months to heal.
“I never told Jeff that I was getting the surgery,” she says. “He thought I was crazy for coming back already.”
So she got the surgery and started rehabbing again. Then in June, she did something that showed that gymnastics was no longer her only goal. In the middle of her comeback, she went to Europe for a month.
Her world expanded again, but she was still the same Courtney. She couldn’t comprehend people sitting outside of coffee shops at 10 or 11 in the morning, couldn’t comprehend stores open without any lights on, barely welcoming any customers. She’d drop everything to go back again now.
Was she still the same Courtney?
***
Courtney walked into Faehn’s office confidently. Courtney said that she was thankful for the opportunity to meet with Faehn, and that she was confident that she could contribute to team.
“She was just so cute and so nice,” Faehn remembers about the meeting. “I could see her bubbling at the opportunity. Any coach would love to have a walk on with a story like hers — especially one with talent like hers.”
It’s easy to find Courtney at practice. You just have to look at the faces of her teammates. She is the comedian of the group, even when she is having a bad day. She role plays and does impressions. If she misses a move, she points to an assistant coach and says, “If you thought that was good, just wait and see what I’ve got next.”
Last year, she started wearing glitter to practice. Gymnasts always wear it during meets, but she just thought it would be fun or funny to wear it to practice as well, and it caught on with the rest of the team.
She picks the first song at practice. Last week, it was “You Rock My World” by Michael Jackson. As she jumps into her warmups with the rest of the team, all the girls start shouting “Go Gators!” It’s a habit for the gymnasts, and no one really thinks about it.
But when Courtney yells “Go Gators!” everyone erupts.
Before meets, the team turns on music to loosen up in the locker room. Courtney dances like no one is watching. Her teammate’s call her crazy-legged Courtney, and teammate Amanda Castillo even tried to document it with a video camera once. When she was spotted, Castillo thought she was busted.
Courtney glanced over at her, laughed, and resumed the routine.
That’s Courtney now.
***
Here’s Courtney now on senior night. This won’t be her last meet in the O’Connell Center because Florida is hosting the NCAA Tournament. But it will be her last time when she walks out of the Gator head and gets introduced by the sonorous announcer and the flashing lights.
She’s competing in two events tonight, like she has for most of this season — the vault and the beam. Before her final vault, as her teammates yell “Go Court!” at piercing decimals, she archs her back, gulps and bobs her head to “According to You” by Orianthi. She scores a 9.875.
Next up is the beam, as she warms up, she wobbles. Rhonda takes her aside after her warmup and talks to her for a few minutes. All Courtney does is listen, smile and nod. Courtney leads on the beams. She hits two back-hand springs and a backflip on her first pass. Her movements are in sync with the music. She twists and flips on the dismount. She wobbled a little, so her score is a 9.750.
Her scores didn’t earn her a place on the podium, but it is senior night, so she meets her dad and Faehn and Wood and some other family and friends in the middle of the stage to accept flowers and a plaque and to watch a montage of her career at Florida — a career that seemed impossible seven years ago.
When she heard the announcer and saw the video, she started to cry. Then the video showed a highlight of her as she was about to vault. The video cut away, but she was happy for the comedic relief.
She just smiled, thankful that she could hold back the tears, hold back the end, for one more moment.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Since her senior day performance, Courtney Gladys has had a huge role in helping the Gators win the championship at the Southeastern Conference and NCAA West Regional meets. In both the SEC and West Regional. Gladys has scored a 9.9 on the balance beam, helping to turn what was once a weakness for the Gators into a strength as they head into the NCAA Gymnastics Championship meet at the Stephen C. O’Connell Center next week.