Sunday, February 20, 2000
Tracy trains Olympians for life
Coach grooms five gymnasts for Sydney Games, and beyond
BY SCOTT MacGREGOR
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Mary Lee Tracy works with Olympic prospect Morgan White on the balance beam.
(Ernest Coleman photos)
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Mary Lee Tracy is standing underneath a large star-spangled banner hanging over the gym floor. It is a pose strikingly similar to the one she envisions at the Olympic medal ceremony in September.
Her sharp voice cuts through the morning air with urgency. “We've got to keep moving forward,” she says. “We've got seven months.”
Seven months to make five Olympians.
Tracy is the owner of Cincinnati Gymnastics Academy, and the coach with the reputation as the nation's new gymnastics guru. An assistant coach at the 1996 Olympics, when the American gymnasts — including two of her proteges — gutted their way to gold, she is likely to be named the head coach for the 2000 Games in Sydney, Australia, this September.
That will put her bright in the world's spotlight. The Americans are the defending Olympic champions, and until new heroes are crowned, the memory that is strongest is of Kerri Strug vaulting the U.S. team — dubbed the Magnificent Seven — to gold in Atlanta.
Jennie Thompson (front) and Dominique Moceanu work on dance moves in class.
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Five of Tracy's pupils have a shot to be part of this year's Magnificent Seven. All moved here because they believe Tracy's tutelage is the best route to their ultimate goal: the Olympics.
What makes her stand out is not her technical expertise, but her style. She is not the dictatorial presence that made the famous Bela Karolyi a princess-maker, but instead teaches with a mother's subtle gentleness under her firm instruction. This is her secret.
“Keep challenging, keep pushing,” Tracy says with encouragement, clapping her sun-polished hands.
It is 9:30 on a frigid winter's morning. This is where young women become Olympians.
Twenty-six elite-level gymnasts in the United States are training to make the Olympics. Five of them — Jennie Thompson, Alyssa Beckerman, Morgan White, Dominique Moceanu and Sierra Sapunar — are doing so at Tracy's gym in Fairfield.
Thompson has a smile, flashing bright as sequins from her round face, that will melt America's heart.
She was the champion of the prestigious American Cup last year, and is the most focused of the elites here, performing the tedious work of training without distraction. This owes to her maturity; at 18, she has been competing in major events for eight years, and was the youngest-ever junior national champion at 12. That, and the confidence boost she received from winning the American Cup, her first international championship, have been immeasurable.
An inspirational wall at the entrance to Tracy's gym includes photos of her 1996 gold medalists, Amanda Borden and Jaycie Phelps.
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Beckerman is like a sculpture, tall and lean, her toned muscles smooth like marble.
She is 19, the oldest of the group, but the one who has grown the most in her two years in Cincinnati. Her skills haven't changed much; her mental toughness and focus have, growing from skittish to somewhat sanguine.
White is a pale pixie, a woman's ambition and maturity emerging from a petite 16-year-old body, all grace and agility.
She speaks with a depth that contradicts her age, and is the toughest of the group, the one who most refuses to give up. Last month, at an American Cup qualifier, she entered the final day's competition seventh out of eight gymnasts and ended as the highest American finisher. “I'm a fighter,” she says.
Moceanu, a 1996 Olympian and the best-known, has been here a month. She had her pick of America's top gyms to mount her journey back to the Olympics, and chose Tracy's.
Moceanu is working herself into shape after four strange years that included a lawsuit against her parents and a knee injury, but still possesses those wonderful technical gifts, the ones that made her an international celebrity and the nation's youngest national champion at 13. If she can get herself in shape before the Olympic trials in August, she has as good a chance as anyone.
But she is battling fatigue and her own mental climb, and Tracy is pushing her in ways she hasn't been pushed for years.
Sapunar has been here the longest — five years — and is the most physically graceful of the five, the one with “world-class flair and elegance,” as assistant coach Terry Gray says. But she has been battling foot and elbow injuries the last two years, and hasn't had a chance to show her stuff at any recent major competitions.
The Olympics are within her long reach. “She's the secret that's been hiding,” Mr. Gray says.
Tracy holds a weekly sports psychology meeting with her Olympic prospects.
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All five have strong potential, with any two or three — or maybe four — likely to make the Olympic team.
And there's no shying from the ultimate goal.
“We talk about (the Olympics) a lot,” Tracy says. “That's why we're here. The level of commitment, of excellence, for these next seven months, has to be huge.”
Their training is painstaking work, hours of repetition and precision crafting.
The great deception of it all is that the pain on their faces — grimaces, focused narrowing of the eyes — belies the grace and composure they will reveal when the cameras are on and the lights of Sydney are bright.
Says White, who is nursing a sore ankle: “I have a goal. I want to reach that goal. I've had this dream my whole life, and it's so close now, I'd never give up. We have the frame of mind right now of, "Whatever it takes.'”
The gift of teaching
Tracy is not a gymnastics coach. She is a teacher whose subject is gymnastics and whose object is life.
Her subject could have been anything. It happened to become gymnastics because she needed a job. She had just graduated from Colerain High School, in 1977, and was waiting tables and moonlighting as a Ben-Gal cheerleader. An opening came up for a gymnastics instructor. Tracy, who had taken some tumbling classes as a cheerleader at Colerain, got the job part time.
She learned gymnastics by watching, by reading, by scouring the country for knowledge, by going to the nation's best gym clubs and observing their instructors. Her innate ability to learn — and to teach what she had learned — made her a natural.
“When I first met her, what I saw was an 18-year-old kid who could teach you anything,” says Lynne Ruhl, the gym's public relations director. They met when Mrs. Ruhl enrolled her daughter in a tumbling class 22 years ago.
“She has the gift of teaching. It's her passion for teaching that makes her different. If you want her eyes to light up, just ask her "Mary Lee, could you teach me how to ..?' And she'll say "Yes!' She doesn't even need to know what. She just loves to teach.”
During one recent training session, Tracy wanted Beckerman to correct the arch of her back on the balance beam. Instead of throwing technical terms at her, Tracy walked over to a big rubber ball and squished the side, illustrating how the ball didn't move as well when one side was flat.
Beckerman got back on the beam and made the correction.
“I've tried to teach other coaches who are technically great. They can see everything, but they don't have the gift of teaching,” Tracy says. “You have to be able to take a piece of information you want the child to absorb and make them understand it. And you have to give them reason to understand it. That's what not everyone can figure out.”
When Tracy was 24, an opportunity came up to buy the gym. Every practical thing she knew said she was getting in over her head, but it was the chance of a lifetime, to be a young woman with her own business.
The old place was more like a storage shed, with nine-foot ceilings that were too low to do routines on the vault or uneven bars. So Tracy and her staff cut a hole in the roof and put a box over it so the girls could extend their bodies. The vault runway was too short for regulation length, but Tracy lengthened it by cleaning out a closet at the end of the ramp and having the girls start from inside.
It was here that Tracy's Olympic dreams spawned, where she began training Amanda Borden, then Jaycie Phelps, who both won gold as part of the Magnificent Seven American squad at the 1996 Olympics. When Borden came close to making the '92 team, Tracy began to think, “Maybe I can play with the big boys.”
In 1997, Cincinnati Gymnastics moved to a new, 20,000-square foot facility in Fairfield. The gym teaches more than 1,500 kids, from toddlers to elites, in tumbling classes to world-class technical training. Tracy's approach of teaching the whole person filters down from the elites to even the tiniest tumblers. Mrs. Ruhl teaches Bible studies for all ages, and Tracy will only hire instructors who share her philosophy.
Before former world champion Kim Zmeskal retired and one-time Olympic hopeful Brittany Smith gave up her quest this year, Tracy was training seven of the nation's top 20 elites. Only one other gym in the country has more than one, Kelli Hill's place in Gaithersburg, Md., with four. Tracy's gym has been rated the top gym in the nation three years running by USA Gymnastics.
“I had no idea this was my path,” Tracy says. “Just like in gymnastics, there are levels you reach. It was a very steady, gradual process. I never took any huge jumps.”
The Tracy touch
The Cincinnati Five have come from across the country — Thompson and Moceanu from Texas, Sapunar from California, Beckerman from New Jersey and White from Florida, — because they liked Tracy's new-age, yet old-school, style.
They observed her at meets and with her two Olympians, and liked the relationship they saw. Tracy hugged Phelps and Borden, laughed with their ecstasy and cried with their agony, talked to them about their schoolwork and families and boys.
Other coaches treated their athletes with detachment, like grunts at a military boot camp. In the book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, author Joan Ryan points out that Mr. Karolyi, seeing Mary Lou Retton with a bag of ice on a fractured wrist, once kicked it off in disgust.
Amy Wert, a Blue Ash native who now coaches at Tracy's gym, moved to Houston at age 12 to train with Mr. Karolyi. The difference between the two gyms, she says, is striking.
“I think this helps prepare the kids better for what's going to happen when this is over,” Mrs. Wert says. “I wouldn't say my coaches (in Houston) didn't care for me. It was just a different style of coaching. There was a lot less communication between athlete and coach.”
Says Tracy: “It's not a right or wrong issue. It's a personal preference.”
But the five women who ultimately moved here saw it as the right preference for them. And with Mr. Karolyi retired from active coaching after the '96 Olympics, no one had a hotter resume.
“There were a lot of girls going there,” Beckerman says. “I figured there must have been something right about it.”
“I got to know her as a person, and I really liked her,” says Thompson, who met Tracy on the post-Olympic tour of 1996. “It helped that she had Amanda and Jaycie, but it was more because of her as a person and the way she coached.”
Tracy often has the team over to her two-story home in West Chester for cookouts or swim parties or just hanging out. She is available to the women 24 hours a day on her cell phone — which, by the way, is in the pattern of an American flag — a resource they often use when they need to talk. She conducts weekly Bible studies and sports psychology classes, where they're taught the lessons they are learning in gymnastics have meaning long after their careers are over.
Tracy's system isn't for everyone. One gymnast left because her mother wanted Tracy to act strictly as a coach. Tracy wasn't offended. “I like my style,” she says. “My core philosophies aren't going to change.”
It is a radical approach, the concept of teaching the whole self — physical, mental, spiritual, emotional well-being. Perhaps it is because the 40-year-old Tracy herself plays so many roles in her own life — coach, businesswoman, single mother, date, Christian servant — that she is so adamant about making each of these girls a woman in full.
“I just try to build the self-esteem of each kid,” Tracy says. “I want my girls to feel like beautiful women. When they walk out into the real world, I don't care about the gymnastics part. I want them to be strong, confident women who can take everything out of gymnastics and use that later in life.
“I don't want them to think life is over if they don't make it.”
Not that Tracy never has a bad day or never gets testy. It's just rare, and she stays steady even at the worst of moments. When Thompson hurt her ankle at the 1999 World Championships and had to withdraw, she was afraid Tracy would be mad. That's the way it often works in gymnastics — the coach is disappointed for herself. But Tracy “was only concerned with my well-being,” Thompson says. “That's different.”
“It makes you have more respect for your coach, and therefore you put more into it,” White says. “I have more respect for her than I've had for any of my other coaches.”
Even Mr. Karolyi, now the coordinator of the American national team, likes Tracy's style.
“It's led with authority combined with a very gentle and well-intended manner. I guess that's the key to their success,” he says. “I was very pleased with what I saw.”
A prophecy come true
Back in 1983, when Tracy bought the gym, she and Mrs. Ruhl often prayed about their future. Each woman counts her Christian faith as the foundation of her life, and they were looking for guidance.
Mrs. Ruhl woke up one morning and excitedly took out a piece of white notebook paper. She wrote that in time, Cincinnati Gymnastics would become internationally known, that Tracy would change the way gymnastics was taught worldwide, that kids would move to Cincinnati to train because of Tracy's coaching style.
Above all, Mrs. Ruhl believed that those kids would think they were coming for gymnastics, but they would really come to be healed — physically or emotionally or spiritually. She had not had a great vision nor a dream, but a quiet feeling of confidence in her soul.
“I don't know why, and I didn't know how, or how long it would take,” says Mrs. Ruhl, who teaches the gym's Bible studies, “but I just knew.”
Thirteen years later, in July 1996, Tracy called Mrs. Ruhl from the Atlanta Olympics, after she, Phelps and Borden had won gold. Tracy had not forgotten about that paper of prophecy, and kept it in her Bible. She took it out, the edges ruffled and yellowed and torn a bit at the creases, and read it.
The old friends could hardly speak. They didn't need to.
“The purpose for this gym, on the outside, looks like gymnastics. But that's not what's going on here,” Mrs. Ruhl says. “It's much bigger than that. Lives are changed here. Kids are dealt with in a way that causes them to grow into great people. We're helping kids grow up to be good, solid people with character.”
Here, the sport is not life; it is merely the instrument.
“If you're in it just to put a kid on the Olympic team, and it doesn't work out, your life could end just like theirs could,” Tracy says.
There are six months to the Olympic trials. But Tracy aims for a lifetime.
“Is life over? It is if that's all you're doing it for. That's not all I'm doing it for.”
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