By Kelly Price
GatorZone.com correspondent
GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Bridget Sloan curls her feet, crunching her red-polished toenails into a therapeutic mat. She surveys the runway she's about to take off from, subtly twisting her shoulders and torso, imagining the movements she will spin through 10 feet above the ground.
“Now on vault … BRIDGET SLOOOOOOOAN,” the announcer booms on March 13. The crowd booms at her return to vault after an eight-week absence. A smile lights Sloan's face like an explosion in a blank sky, crinkling her cerulean eyes as she puffs her chest out for the crowd.
Her muscles are so defined they appear as sharp edges. Just strolling around the O'Connell Center, it looks as if her calf muscles could slice through cardboard. Yet today, the University of Florida gymnast just wants to keep her heels close together as she thuds onto a mat at several miles per hour. After sustaining a nearly season-ending severe ankle sprain in early January, Sloan is barreling toward the most elusive notch on her collegiate career: a 10.0 on the uneven bars – the only event in which she hasn't achieved perfection.
Sloan has been an all-around competitor for most her life. Through her 12-year gymnastics career, she has garnered everything from a silver team medal at the 2008 Olympics to multiple NCAA titles in an orange and blue leotard. The Gators have looked to her during their back-to-back national championship seasons, as they will ahead of the SEC and NCAA championships this season.
“My heart broke for her because I knew she wanted to be out there competing,” Sloan's mother, Mary, says. “She's a competitor. This is what she loves to do.”
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Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., is about an hour and a half away from Sloan's home in Pittsboro, Ind. When the Florida gymnastics team travelled there for a meet Jan. 11, Sloan's parents, her three siblings and others made the trip to see her.
As she warmed up, Sloan thought the floor wasn't as bouncy as she's used to. The floor had dead spots – small patches that felt rigid and unforgiving as Sloan performed her routine.
On the final tumbling pass of her floor routine, she sprung backwards into the air, twirling ferociously. Then, a thud. As her foot pounded into the floor, her mouth widened, consuming her face in pain.
The more than 50 fans watching the routine behind Sloan's corner of the floor – most recording the action on cellphones – stared in horror, some of their mouths hanging open as well. Even a security guard at the facility door behind the fans craned his neck to see what that thud was.
To Sloan, it sounded like she threw a rock onto the ground.
She says she may have opened the pass too early – essentially letting go of her legs mid-flip, too high and a split-second early. But her right foot wasn't ready for the hard landing.
“(Sometimes) I know (the landing) is going to be crooked,” she says, shrugging. “On the floor, I felt fine. It was a … very big surprise.”
Her gut reaction after the thud: Destroyed.
It wasn't the pain that cued her. Looking down at her ankle, Sloan recalls her “whole foot had, like, shifted inward.”
Oh my gosh. What did I just do?
She waved over athletic trainer Kelly Bridges and sliced her hand across her neck, mouthing “I'm done.”
The trainer had instant concerns.
“I knew it must be awful because Sloan can usually push through a lot of things,” Bridges says.
From the crowd, Mary and Jeff Sloan watched as their daughter was carried off the floor. “I knew it wasn't good,” Mary says.
Rarely at a loss for words, Sloan went silent.
“Let me cope with what I just did and figure out what I just did,” she responded tensely, “because it doesn't feel right.”
When Sloan couldn't finish the routine, Rhonda Faehn guessed the worst as well.
“I thought it was probably broken when she picked it up and couldn't finish,” Faehn says. “It was a challenging meet after that.”
X-rays and MRIs would be done when the team returned to Gainesville. Mary Sloan told her daughter she loved her as she watched her get onto the team bus, not knowing what the injury was, its severity, or what would happen next.
“It was the hardest thing,” she says, “knowing that she was hurt.”
Then-top-ranked Florida stole the meet from Ball State, but there were so many unknowns afterward. Faehn grimaces thinking of the first few meets without Sloan.
The team underwent an identity crisis, she says, as teammates figured out their new roles – including a sidelined Sloan. From being the youngest gymnast on the 2008 U.S. Olympic team that won silver in Beijing, to the 2009 World Championships all-around winner, to last season's NCAA uneven bars title and 2013 all-around and balance beam titles, to 16-time All-American, Sloan's résuméjust goes on and on.
Cheerleader wasn't one of them.
“I won't lie – it's been very hard for her,” Faehn says. “She didn't know what to do with herself.”
“I knew that was just going to be terrible,” her mom says of the five meets Sloan had to sit out.
Sloan could only watch on TV as Florida missed landing after landing at SEC rival Alabama in late January. The Gators “really dug ourselves a big hole” Faehn would later say. UF lost its first road meet since Sloan sprained her ankle by 0.6 points.
This can't go on all season.
That thought soon became omnipresent for Sloan.
She had options to explore for the rest of the year and her career: She could redshirt or rehab.
“That's just the stubborn me coming out,” she says. “I'm not redshirting. I was like, 'I don't care what you guys want me to do.' It's my decision ultimately and I said I didn't want to.”
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During a Feb. 24 practice, her teammates sprint, vault, flip and move freely. Sloan's gaze drifts to the other stations around the O'Connell Center's gymnastics practice facility as she works on balancing herself on a green VersaDisc, a UFO-shaped, air-filled rehab tool that helps strengthen the ankle through balance.
Her lips purse and tongue sticks out and she loses her balance a few times as Justin Bieber's “As Long As You Love Me” booms from the facility's speakers. She bounces off, grasping her thighs, trembling.
“I miss it more than ever knowing I could get back out there,” she says.
Bridges, the team's athletic trainer, watches over her rehab closely. She serves as Sloan's stoplight – telling her when to stop, go, stop, go – and there have been a lot of red lights.
When Sloan was preparing to get back onto bars: “When am I going to be ready for beam or floor or vault?”
After getting back on bars: “All right, when am I going to be free for everything?”
“Um, whoa,” Bridges often would tell Sloan. “Hold your horses.”
At this point in her rebab, the ligaments on the inside and outside of Sloan's ankle are not as strong as they need to be; they are stretched and lax around her ankle because it was such a severe sprain.
Sloan has gone through a structured rehabilitation process to ensure those ligaments heal and tighten so she can return by season's end: massaging to decrease tightness, acupuncture to help with joint swelling and blood flow, and the use of a Graston, a metal massage tool that looks like a bike handlebar, for decreasing scar tissue and increasing blood flow.
“She's very motivated to get back. She's always pushing herself,” Bridges says. “For her, it was always kind of hard for us to tell her, 'Oh, you have to step back a bit, take your time.' But she's a really motivated person.”
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9:30 a.m., Sloan looks up at three flights of stairs in Larsen Hall. She trudges 45 steps up with about 10 extra pounds between her crutches and boot. All for World Communication Systems.
Bridget Sloan has been a team leader and fan favorite in her three seasons at UF. (File photo)
Some days, she stuck around practice and lingered on campus a little longer than she needed just to avoid climbing up three flights of stairs to get to her apartment. No elevator, no help. Even getting off the couch to go to the bathroom five steps away could be a nuisance.
“It was so hard every day to just go up and down, up and down,” she says. “Once I left my apartment in the morning, I normally either didn't come home at all or I came home at the last possible minute, and once I was upstairs, we were not leaving again.”
Sure, she'd sprained her ankle before. She'd even sprained multiple ligaments in this ankle before. She'd had surgery on her left shoulder and knee. But this sprain was different.
A grueling therapy and rehab regimen was required for Sloan to return to competition her junior season. “This is the first time it was all on me,” she says. “A doctor wasn't putting me back together.”
The only time Sloan has ever wanted to go on a run was while she was shackled in her walking boot with crutches. She doesn't even like running. But seeing joggers pass her on campus makes her actually want to run.
“I would kill to go on a run right now,” she says. “I pretend that I'm a rock, and I'm not.”
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The pearl earrings come out. Wisps of Sloan's chili-powder-red hair break free from the bun tied atop her head.
She wraps off-white grips around her wrists and palms at another February practice in the O'Connell Center. She peeks over at the two bars, one 5-foot-6, the other 8-foot tall. Beyond the bars, on the north wall of the facility, is a blue-hued image of Sloan smiling back at her from the wall of “Perfect 10s.”
Fear of the pain she might feel when her feet make contact with the bars bubbles in her mind.
She jumps for the taller bars, grabbing and swinging like a child on monkey bars. Propelling her body forward, swinging around the bar, she lets go. Around and around she goes.
She sticks the landing.
Her ankle doesn't fall off, the pain isn't excruciating.
“That was a turning point, like yes, I can do this,” she says later.
The order of business was always from bars to beam to vault.
Step No. 1 happened in Baton Rouge on Feb. 20.
As Sloan stepped to the bars, Faehn says she wasn't worried. The routine went as flawlessly as only Sloan could execute.
“Great routine!” Faehn exclaimed, hugging Sloan.
“I could have stuck my dismount,” Sloan deadpanned.
Faehn looked at her. “It's your first time back.”
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Blasting from the O'Connell Center speakers, Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump has sung the team's introductory song at home meets all season long:
Some legends are told,
Some turn to dust or to gold.
The video's ending message, “built on two; focused on three,” places a little more pressure onto the tiny gymnasts' shoulders each time they compete at home.
And tonight, March 13, is the Gators' last chance to compete at home in 2015. Senior Night.
Sloan hates Senior Night. She hates the emotions. She hates having to wear waterproof eye makeup.
But you will remember me,
Remember me for centuries.
It's the end of the team's season in the O'Connell Center, but the biggest contests lie ahead: the Southeastern Conference championships that start Saturday in Duluth, Ga., and the NCAA championships.
The team has experimented with new lineups, a few tweaks in each routine to tune up before attempting to defend back-to-back national titles. Sloan is looking to defend her uneven bars title, grasping for that perfect 10.
And just one mistake
Is all it will take.
Sloan begins her uneven bars routine, leaping onto the first set of bars, twirling and propelling her body around and around. The pressure is as palatable as the flakes of white chalk powder floating in the air.
Then, the landing. The moment Sloan has been practicing, ingraining into muscle memory to simply keep her heels together. The only deduction she has received this season on uneven bars, the new nuisance in collegiate scoring among thousands of small hundredths-of-points that can be stripped from a perfect score.
And then she sticks it, heels together. She knows as soon as she lands, and pretty much everyone around her does too.
“10! 10! 10!” the crowd chants as a judge scribbles notes.
In Sloan's head: Oh come on, please, please, please, please.
Her score: 10.00.
When Sloan is excited, all of her muscles stretch out her face, as if the surface physically can't handle the amount of joy inside. Her jaw extends into an open smile, her fists pump into the air, her hair wags wildly in its bun.
A sea of orange and blue leotards engulfs her to the side of the uneven bars where Sloan (photo, right) has made history. With the 10, Sloan becomes the first University of Florida gymnast to record perfect scores on all four events in the program's 43-year history.
Fellow gymnast Kytra Hunter, one of Sloan's closest friends, is one of the first to embrace Sloan after she comes off the mat.
“Do you know you have a 10 on every event?” she asks Sloan. “That is incredible. You are literally perfect.”
Faehn, also in the wave of small-bodied gymnasts, beams as well.
“It was almost like an exclamation point, like, 'you're going to give me this 10!'” Faehn says after the meet. “I thought it was the best routine I've seen her do collegiately, so very well-deserved. That's what? Two 10s for her this year alone? And in the small amount of time she's been able to compete, so that's pretty impressive.”
When asked later if she feels guilty for stealing the spotlight on Senior Night, Sloan looks to her left and replies … “no,” before releasing her smug giggle.
“Gymnastics is a beautiful sport because you can never be satisfied,” she says. “I mean, you can be perfect for one week, but can you be perfect for two weeks or can you be perfect for even three?”
