Fullerton Is Hoping to Vault Back to the Future : Titan Gymnasts Making First Appearance in NCAA Championship Since 1986

At 21, Heather Thomas is the old lady of Cal State Fullerton gymnastics.

When the Titans begin competition in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. championships at Athens, Ga., today, Thomas will be the only gymnast who was on the last Titan team to compete for the national championship.

That was in 1986, when Thomas was a freshman who spent a lot of time looking up to Tami Elliott, one of the best gymnasts in Fullerton history. That was back when Fullerton’s making it to the nationals was as sure a as spring making it to April.

For 11 years in a row, Fullerton was in the nationals. That streak ended after 1986, though. Now Fullerton is back, after a two-year absence.

For Coach Lynn Rogers, the central emotion is relief.

“I confess to kind of taking for granted those 11 years, assuming we’d always have healthy kids, assuming I’d always make the right decisions,” Rogers said. “Then there was the dry spell.”

And now there is this team, a team with no seniors and only two juniors--Thomas and Debbie Broderick. It is a team that is so young that it may not much feel the pressure of the nationals. After all, the whole team will be back to try again next year.

Thomas was one of the gymnasts who performed best at the NCAA West Regionals at Titan Gym, leading the team to a finish that made the Titans sixth-seeded team in the 12-team national championships, which conclude Saturday. Along with Thomas, Fullerton’s highlighted performances in the regionals came from sophomore Stacey Harris and Gina Satterly, a freshman who set two school records this season, one on the balance beam, and another in the floor exercise that she shares with Harris.

She has been at Fullerton longer than anyone else one the women’s team. She might also qualify as the most heavily taped.

She was redshirted in 1987, the year after her freshman year, because of knee surgery. Last year, after suffering a bad ankle sprain just before the season, she was limited to competing on the uneven bars and balance beam, forgoing the vault and floor exercise and the strain they would have added to her knees and ankles.

As she practiced one day last week, Thomas had one knee and both ankles taped.

But the time off, and the time away from vault and floor exercise seem to have helped, more than hurt.

“Typically, you see at 16 or 17 that gymnasts plateau out,” Rogers said. “She’s better now than she was at 16 or 17. I wish we had her for three or four more years.”

Last year, as she stayed away from vault and floor, she improved on bars. Now bars may have surpassed the beam as her best event.

“I’ve learned a lot on bars,” Thomas said.

Said Rogers: “There’s a range or margin of safety when you’re working on bars. She plays on the aggressive end of everything she does.”

The aggressive end, in this case, is a release move on the bars that Rogers said not many others at Athens will do.

“That may be the single most important individual event for us,” Rogers said. “If she hits and makes the final, she’s in the top eight and that gives her a chance at the national championship.”

The strength of this team, though, is that it doesn’t have to rely on one person or one event. There are no superstars, and no dead weight. That makes for confidence going into this weekend.

“I just think we need to go in and do what we did all year,” Thomas said. “I don’t think we’ve had a bad meet.”

Fullerton, seeded sixth, is shooting for second through fourth at the nationals. UCLA is highly favored, and seeded No. 1.

With Thomas at one end of the scale, Satterly, a freshman from Chino High School who competed for KIPs gymnastics, anchors the other.

With a well-developed natural sense of balance and awareness of space, she she excels on the balance beam.

“You could put this kid upside down and blind-folded in a dark room and she’d be able to land with out taking a step,” Rogers said.

Should she make an error, Rogers said, she is more able than most to make up for it quickly.

“When she’s off, she can make the correction before it’s too late,” he said.

Satterly, still enjoying getting used to the differences between individually oriented club gymnastics and the college team sport, said she is trying to keep her excitement in check.

“We’re trying to stay low key and not get all pumped up because we haven’t done that all season,” she said. “I don’t think anything will really change. That’s kind of been our style all year. We know our job and we go do it.”