Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 6, 1994 TAG: 9404060045
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RALPH BERRIER JR. STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
She is in the twilight of a gymnastics career that has taken up three-quarters of her life. She still competes, but her best days are behind her. She is not the gymnast she was seven years ago, when she had a realistic shot of making the Olympics.
She's mature enough to realize that. That's because in two months, Epperly will be 21 years old.
"That's old for a gymnast," Epperly said.
Women's gymnastics is a world ruled by nimble teen-age girls who can bound and twist like only nimble teen-age girls can. By the time a gymnast reaches her late teens, nature creeps in and makes joints a little stiffer and renders the limbs a little less pliable.
Epperly is certainly not old, but she has lived a full gymnastics life. She has been a precocious childhood prodigy. She had hopes of reaching the Olympics. She won a state championship as a ninth-grader at Cave Spring and earned a full college scholarship.
These days, Epperly is content to represent Radford University in the NCAA Southeast Regional on Saturday at West Virginia University. Radford freshman Michelle Libero will also be going with Epperly, a Roanoke native who is making her second straight NCAA appearance.
"I'm just glad that I stuck with it," Epperly said. "A lot of girls quit totally by the time they're my age."
Epperly has been competing since she was 5 years old. Her training intensified after her family moved to Richmond when she was 7. Epperly was an Elite gymnast by age 11 and was regularly beating girls two and three years older. She was so good that when the family moved back to Roanoke after three years in Richmond, her coach, Keith Bullock, also moved.
When she was 13, she and her mother left for Parkettes, a national training center in Allentown, Pa. Her goals were high.
"I had really planned to go to the '88 Olympics," she said.
The training regimen at Parkettes was rigorous. She attended school there, worked out nearly six hours a day, and had to maintain a specific weight, often by fasting.
After a year at Parkettes, Epperly placed 21st in the national meet in 1987. It is conceivable that she could have made the top seven in 1988 and earned an Olympic spot with another year of training, but the year at Parkettes had worn her out.
"My mom tried to motivate me to stay up there," Epperly said. However, "I couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel."
She gave up her Olympic hopes by not continuing her training.
"I think it worked out for the better," she said, without regrets. "I got a national ranking, I went to names then, you don't hear of [them] anymore."
"I had been pushed since I was 5 years old. By then [1988], I was getting burned out. A lot of gymnasts experience that. A lot of gymnasts who had national names then, you don't hear of [them] anymore."
Instead of Olympic gold, Epperly in 1988 settled for a Group AAA state title. By her senior year, Cave Spring had dropped gymnastics, but Epperly gained the attention of Cal State-Fullerton by sending the school a videotape of her best performances. She was rewarded with a scholarship.
Once she was there, however, she experienced the same burnout she had felt when she was 13. The program was intensive, as it had been at Parkettes, only this time there was no Olympic payoff.
"I wanted to have fun with the sport," she said. "Coach [Lynn Rogers of Cal State-Fullerton] felt like it was more of a job and that we had to earn our right to be there."
So, in 1992 Epperly returned home again and enrolled at Radford, where her brother, Richard, had played a couple of years of baseball. She joined a program coached by Paul Beckwith, whom she had worked with in Roanoke at the School of Gymnastic Arts shortly before going to Parkettes.
Epperly will most likely go down as the best gymnast in the short history of Radford's women's program. She has broken the Highlanders' all-around scoring record twice and currently holds the mark of 38.45 points. She also holds team records in vaulting (9.8), in the floor exercise (9.775) and on the balance beam (9.7). Her vault record is the highest score ever registered by a Radford gymnast.
"Once I did come back here, [getting] the moral support I needed and working with Paul started making gymnastics fun again," she said.
Said Beckwith, "There's not the high-pressure, win-at-all-costs attitude here that there is at Fullerton. It's different here. I don't yell and scream at the athletes, because they're adults now." None more so than Epperly.
"It's still exciting to know I have what it takes," Epperly said. "This is exciting for a 20-year old still in gymnastics."
by CNB