Umeh Hopes to Make UCLA a Pain in Neck

That first instant was frozen panic for everyone who watched as UCLA’s Stella Umeh landed hard on her head on a dismount from the uneven bars.

“I thought the worst had happened,” said Coach Valorie Kondos, who rushed to Umeh’s side.

But by then, Umeh, lying on the mat, had taken a quick inventory.

“There wasn’t time to be scared,” she said. “I’m on the ground, looking up at the lights. Am I alive? I’m alive. Am I paralyzed? I’m not paralyzed. It was not fear. I was just so annoyed I’d done that. I was angry at myself. I thought I was done for the day.”

If Umeh was done for the day, the next fear was that UCLA was done for the season.

The defending national champions are hosts of the NCAA women’s gymnastics championships at Pauley Pavilion Thursday through Saturday.

But without a comeback at the NCAA West Regional two weekends ago, UCLA’s gymnasts would have been spectators in their own gym.

Umeh returned from the fall, which left her with bruised vertebrae and little range of motion in her neck, to stick a perfect vault in the final rotation and help send UCLA into the nationals.

Georgia, Alabama and Utah are the traditional favorites, but UCLA is one of three Pacific 10 teams in the 12-team field, along with Washington and Arizona State. The Bruins, a surprise champion last season, are seeded 10th.

“The expectations definitely went up from the outside after last season,” Umeh said. “But the pressures within the group remained the same. Our biggest pressure was just to make it because nationals are at home.

“The joke all year was, ‘What will happen if we don’t make it to nationals?’ Then the second half of the season, it was kind of . . . it was disastrous. It started not becoming a joke, but a faint reality.”

That day at the regional at the University of Washington, the team decided UCLA was going back, no matter what.

On that final rotation on vault, UCLA needed the equivalent of 9.8s across the board to qualify. Umeh wasn’t the only one to come through. Her 9.9 vault was the highest score possible on the vault she attempted, and Lena Degteva came through with a 9.925 and Kiralee Hayashi added another 9.9, all career-high scores in the event.

“It was amazing to see the team evolve,” Umeh said. “We’d been hesitant all season. We know we have the talent. When it got to that point, we said, ‘There’s no way we’re going out like this. We’ve got to fight.’ ”

Umeh had to fight against some resistance. Not everyone thought it was a good idea for her to vault--especially since she does a Yurchenko vault, a sometimes dangerous maneuver that until this year was banned in NCAA competition.

In 1988, a gymnast on the U.S. national team, Julissa Gomez, slipped while practicing a Yurchenko vault in Tokyo and broke her neck, falling into a three-year coma before dying in 1991.

This year, the NCAA decided to allow the Yurchenko vault, marked by a roundoff onto the springboard and a back handspring over the vault, only because of the introduction of additional safety equipment to prevent and cushion slips or misses.

“I’m really lucky it came in for my senior year,” said Umeh, a 1992 Olympic gymnast for Canada. “I’ve been doing that vault since I was 10. It’s kind of sadistic to say, but I’ve landed on my head and neck so many times on that vault.”

After her fall on the bars at Washington, Umeh emerged from X-rays and saw her team in a big hole.

“When I came back, we were going into [balance] beam, and I remember standing there, thinking how far behind we were, and I was even more angry with myself that I had ‘made contact with the ground,’ ” she said. “When I heard the scores, I started crying, knowing I couldn’t contribute.”

Soon enough, though, she was finding a way.

“I was safe, neurologically; I wasn’t going to do anything to hurt myself,” she said. “But I had zero range. I could only move my head side to side. I could say no but I couldn’t say yes.”

She hardly gave anyone else a chance to say no.

“I said, ‘I’m vaulting.’ I have this militant tenacity. I said, ‘I am.’ We got the doctor and got an OK.”

If those who heard about Umeh’s comeback had visions of Kerri Strug, Umeh and Kondos dismiss that.

“I don’t think anyone even thought about Kerri,” said Kondos, even though Strug--the 1996 Olympian who vaulted in an emotional scene despite an injured ankle as the U.S. women won the gold--is a UCLA student and part-time volunteer assistant coach who often works out with the team.

Umeh gathered herself but wasn’t quite good enough on her first attempt.

She nailed her second.

“She had deserved a perfect score in other meets before, in my opinion,” Kondos said. “She can do that vault in her sleep.

“But I don’t think she got that score out of any sympathy. The vault judges, they didn’t know what had gone on with the bars. They had their backs to the bars, and there were no breaks.”

Umeh, still nursing a tender neck, insists she is out of the inspirational comeback business.

“I’m not doing it this week,” she said with a laugh. “Someone else can do it.”

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NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships

* When: Thursday (preliminaries, 1 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.), Friday (team finals, 7:30 p.m.) and Saturday (individual finals, 7:30 p.m.).

* Where: Pauley Pavilion.

* Defending champion: UCLA.