Not the Best, Yet--Just the Toughest : Bruin Gymnast, With Broken Ankle, Barely Missed U. S. Team

Shawn McGinnis may not be the best gymnast on the UCLA women’s team, but she is probably the toughest.

The best Bruin is probably senior Tanya Service, the Pacific 10 Conference gymnast of the year in 1987 and 1989. And Service gets stiff competition from junior Kim Hamilton, two-time defending NCAA floor exercise champion, and junior Jill Andrews, last year’s NCAA vault champion.

But this season McGinnis has been pushing her three teammates. After a UCLA career that has been hampered by injuries, the 5-foot, 4-inch junior from Anaheim Hills has surpassed personal records in five of UCLA’s nine dual meets.

Last week Hamilton won the all-around competition and Service finished second as UCLA won the team competition at the West Regionals at Cal State Fullerton and earned the top seed at the NCAA championships. The nationals will be held April 14-15 at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Oregon State’s Joy Selig finished third among individuals at Fullerton, but close behind her in fourth place was McGinnis, who could be the mainstay of next year’s team for Coach Jerry Tomlinson.

She could be, that is, if her daring does not lead to more injuries.

“Break a leg” may be words of encouragement for actors, but that should never even be whispered around a gymnast, especially McGinnis.

McGinnis would have liked to score a few points for the U.S. national team in last year’s Olympics. But in trials a couple of years ago she missed making the team by finishing five-hundredths of a point (0.05) in her score behind the last gymnast to earn a spot.

She might have made the team if she hadn’t been trying out on a broken ankle.

“I didn’t know it was broken,” she said. “I thought it was just sprained and sore. But even though it was swollen, I did not want to give it up.”

She was injured, she said, during a meet just before the national trials. On her first tumbling pass in floor exercise, “I landed really bad.”

There have been other unhappy landings for McGinnis.

In 1986 she tore ligaments in a knee, again while tumbling in floor exercise. She had surgery to repair the injury and as a UCLA freshman in 1987 didn’t see much action.

Before her sophomore season, she came down with a kidney ailment that kept her out of action until mid-season. “It was a congenital problem,” she said. “A kidney wasn’t functioning and it almost burst.”

By mid-season of last year, however, she had recovered and came back to finish as one of UCLA’s better all-around gymnasts. She also placed third on the bars at last year’s Pac-10 championships and was named all-conference.

Her strong performances this season might have been stronger were it not for painful shinsplints.

She thought at first that the inflammations in her lower legs, brought on by the constant pounding from landings, might have been stress fractures. But she had a few weeks to recover after UCLA won its third consecutive Pac-10 championship on March 4.

Last season Service dislocated an elbow in the West Regionals and could not compete in the NCAA meet. Senior Gigi Zosa missed all of last year after knee surgery, and she is competing on a limited basis this year with a fractured wrist.

The UCLA gymnastics press guide is a litany of painful injuries: a ruptured Achilles’ tendon here, chronic elbow pain there, ankle and wrist ailments everywhere. All gymnasts are familiar with pain.

But trying out for the U.S. team with a broken ankle, even if it was heavily taped? C’mon, McGinnis.

Coach Tomlinson said that he could not personally testify about the broken ankle, but he added, “I wouldn’t doubt that at all.”

McGinnis, he said, turned out for this season’s first practice with no doubt that she would have a good year.

“This is probably the strongest year of her life,” he said. “She came (to UCLA) “a very talented gymnast and was extremely strong all the time in practice.

“She just really hadn’t mastered the art of competing as well as she works out, which is common. And then she’s had injuries almost every year of her career which have kept her from doing everything she wanted to do.

“But Shawn McGinnis walked into the gym last September a different Shawn. You could see it in her and feel it from her. She had an extremely confident and aggressive attitude.

“You could tell she had made a change over the summer. She had set goals and made a commitment that nothing was going to stand in her way.”

Not a painful kidney ailment, not torn knee ligaments, not shinsplints, not even a broken ankle could have stayed her from her determined rounds with the UCLA team this year.

Tomlinson said McGinnis was the first woman gymnast with the courage to do a trick in floor exercise called a full twisting doubleback. The stunt is two backward somersaults with a full twist on the first somersault.

He said she has performed the twisting doubleback--and done well--five times in meets and that he thinks only one other college woman gymnast has tried the trick in a meet. His best gymnast, Service, has done it in practice, he added.

McGinnis thinks her main asset as a gymnast is strength. “I’ve always been big-boned and strong, and that has always benefited me because strength is needed in gymnastics.”

And anyone who doubts that she was once strong enough to do tumbling, somersaults and jarring landings on a busted ankle had better be prepared to take more than a little guff from McGinnis. She is of Irish descent, you know.

Still, didn’t she ever consider quitting gymnastics after the sport had done such a good job of roughing her up? She replied with an emphatic no .

“I didn’t want to give it up; I wanted to do it partly for the college and partly for me. I like it, or else I wouldn’t still be doing it.

“I like the sport, and I guess the injuries made me want to do better,” she said, adding that when she returned from an injury she always worked harder.

She said it was tougher on her when she had an incapacitating injury to be “sitting around in a cast, watching everyone work out.”

“You know that along with the sport there are going to be problems. I always think that an injury is a freak think that is never going to happen again. I try to put (the thought of injuries) in the back of my mind.”

In the front of her mind is a strong desire to make the most of the rest of her college gymnastics career.

“I want to do really well in college,” she said, adding that she prefers college gymnastics to the kind she was required to do as a top amateur in U.S. Gymnastics Federation meets before she came to UCLA.

In college, she explained, you don’t have to perform compulsory routines, and “USGF coaching is stressful and so intense.”

“College coaching is more relaxed, and there is more encouragement and support. There is more positiveness; now it’s for the team and the school. It’s more fun when the whole team is out pushing for one another; in USGF gymnastics, everyone is out for herself.”

She said that is not to say there is no petty jealousy in college gymnastics. “It exists; you can’t say it doesn’t. But I just try to push it aside because, if you get caught up in (jealousy and envy), that will ruin you, not help you.”

She thinks that UCLA has a good chance to win the NCAA title and that the Bruins’ chief competition will come from defending NCAA champion Alabama and Florida.

UCLA should have the edge because of the differing natures of teams from the East and the West, she said. Eastern teams like to “be conservative but clean” in their tricks, she said. “I think we’re stronger, but clean.”

Doubters would be well advised to steer clear of McGinnis.