Junior has restored confidence after struggling to return from ankle injury
Two phrases — “Tight and concise” and “Expand the positives” — though seemingly short and unimportant, changed Julie Abaray’s beam routines, and the rest of her gymnastics, after an inconsistent start to her season.
Only a couple of weeks ago, Abaray, a junior on Missouri’s gymnastics team, was struggling with her consistency on the four-inch wide apparatus.
“I would get really nervous, and I guess I wasn’t saying the right things,” Abaray said. “I would, not on purpose, but I would picture myself in my head falling. And obviously that’s not what I wanted to do. I’ve been able to overcome that.”
What she has had to overcome started the day after Christmas in 2005 when she suffered a second-degree ankle sprain while working on her tumbling on floor. The injury kept Abaray out of the competitive lineup for the first half of her sophomore season. When she was able to return to competition she found that it was her confidence rather than her ankle that was taking longer to heal.
“I know all last season I was probably pretty cautious with my ankle because I didn’t want to land anything wrong and hurt it worse than it already was,” she said. “But I think it also kind of took a blow on my confidence too. I know that the rest of that season I wasn’t as confident about my beam performance, and I think that carried over a lot to this year too.”
The beginning of Abaray’s junior season showed many signs of brilliance as well as indications that her confidence wasn’t back to where it had been before the injury.
“I would go out there and I would fall one weekend and then nail a routine the next weekend and then fall again and then nail a routine the next weekend,” the Cincinnati, Ohio, native said. “I think I was just kind of, I didn’t know what I was going to get from myself every weekend, and that’s not very comforting.”
Abaray says the turning point for her came after a particularly tough competition in February.
“I had fallen the meet before at the Beauty and the Beast meet,” Abaray said. “And that next meet, I went out and I hit all my routines. And I think at that point, I was just kind of like, ‘You know this is silly to be psyching yourself out about something that wasn’t even a problem.’”
The new Julie Abaray was on display at the Tigers’ meet at Michigan. Competing fifth in the lineup on beam, Abaray’s right foot slipped to the side of the apparatus during one of the backhand springs in her series.
But instead of falling four feet to the mat below and to an automatic half-point deduction, Abaray did something that surprised even her own teammates and coaches. Somehow despite the misplaced foot and a crooked backhand spring, she stayed on the beam.
“I’m really not sure how I stayed on the beam,” Abaray said laughing. “After I got off Ali (Gilmore) was like, ‘Gosh can you teach me how to do that?’ I think a lot of it was luck. I think it was luck and most of the time my series is crooked anyways, so I think I’ve learned to compensate.”
While Abaray may attribute it to luck, her teammates have other ideas.
“I think that was pure will,” junior Ashley Khederian said. “Her back leg buckled and then her other leg. I mean none of us thought she was going to make it, and then she’s still on the beam. She wobbled a little bit, but we thought she was just going to throw it off the side of the beam. We didn’t even think she was going to go for it, and then she kind of pulled up.”
Abaray says the positive talk, her six silent words, definitely gets her in the right frame of mind to compete.
Coach Rob Drass agrees that Abaray’s gymnastics has always largely depended on her confidence level.
“It’s a mental approach for her,” Drass said. “For her to know that we believe in her, and for her to do it so she can believe in herself and then repeat it so that there’s a track record or a history of it.”
Abaray’s gymnastics has never been in question at least to her coaches and teammates.
“Her asset is the execution, the way she does what she does,” Drass said. “It’s like her body line, her toes are always pointed, everything’s done with her legs together. It’s just the way gymnastics is meant to be done.”
Nikki Bowman, a junior on MU, agrees with Drass.
“Definitely the thing that sets her aside is her impeccable form,” Bowman said. “We always talk about how she may not have the difficulty that some people do, but everything’s perfect and the judges just cannot take anything from it.”
With her newfound confidence Abaray hopes to help her team achieve their ultimate goal: making nationals as a team, much of which hinges on Abaray’s clean routines.
“The season obviously didn’t start out how I wanted it to, and it kind of took awhile to get where I am right now, but I hope I can, or I know I can finish off the season.”