Comeback From Down Under Gives Titan Gymnasts a Boost

When the 1996 Olympic Games ended, Joanna Hughes, who represented Australia in Atlanta, decided her gymnastics career was over.

“After 12 years of really heavy training, I was ready to give it up,” Hughes said. “I was practicing about 35 hours a week, plus going to high school. It had gotten to be too much for me.”

But her retirement didn’t last.

Hughes, who finished 34th in the Olympic all-around competition, is competing again at age 22 for Cal State Fullerton.

She tied for first on the bars in her debut for the Titans on Sunday in their season opener against UC Santa Barbara and Arizona State.

“I found that I really missed the challenge of the sport,” Hughes said.

After graduating from high school, Hughes worked in a department store for a while, did some coaching and attended Monash University in her native Melbourne for a year.

A year ago, she talked to Mark Carlton, her coach in Australia, about the possibility of a comeback as a college gymnast.

“I started working out to try to get back into shape so someone would offer me a scholarship,” she said. “I had lost a lot of my strength, but once I got my body back in shape, the gymnastics moves came back fairly quickly.”

Fullerton was one of the schools Carlton recommended to Hughes because of his previous association with Titan Coach Julie Knight, frequently a judge in international events.

“I knew Joanna had been an outstanding gymnast in 1996, but I didn’t know what she had been doing since then,” Knight said. “I told her to send me a tape. We watched it and offered her a scholarship.”

Hughes made her comeback at the World University Games in Spain last summer, her first competition in 2 1/2 years. Knight was one of the two U.S. judges at the meet.

“I could tell she was much better then than she was when I watched her on the videotape,” Knight said. “And she’s better now than she was then. We’re extremely pleased to have her with us.”

Hughes has competed in the World Championships four times and finished as high as sixth in the floor exercise in 1994. She was 19th in the all-around at the 1991 World Championships as a 13-year-old. An elbow injury that required surgery kept her from competing in the 1992 Olympics.

“She’s worked hard to get back to where she is now,” Knight said. “And she has had to do a lot of it on her own because her Australian coaches have been busy with their national team.”

Hughes, a sophomore, said she has been pleased with her progress. “In a couple of my events, I feel like I’m getting close to what I was able to do before I retired,” she said.

Hughes joined the Titans a little more than a week before the first meet, and has had to adjust to the 18-hour time change and some slight differences in the event apparatus.

Her 9.85 score on the bars in her first meet equaled the school’s all-time top performance in the event. She also had scores of 9.55 in the vault and 9.225 in floor exercise, but those routines had reduced difficulty, Knight said.

“We want to make sure we don’t push her too quickly,” said Knight, whose Titans host UCLA at 7 p.m. Monday. “We’ll play it safe about what we expect from her for a while.”

Hughes said she likes the team atmosphere of college gymnastics.

“In elite gymnastics, especially on the international level, it’s much more of an individual sport,” she said. “I missed the way it was when I started and it was more of a team thing. We have a goal of winning the Big West championship this season, and I hope we can do that.”