Brooklyn Moors didn’t need to say the words to know. The UCLA gymnast and coach Janelle McDonald had the same idea to address Moors’ balance beam struggles.
For the majority of her two-decade gymnastics career, Moors has avoided tumbling backward. Even the simplest skills such as a back handspring, which most elite gymnasts master by Kindergarten age, left her mind frozen with fear.
Moors had successfully worked around a mental block for more than a decade. She took the path of most resistance toward her Olympic dream, learning a dizzying array of front tumbling skills to become an Olympian, a 2021 Olympic all-around finalist for Canada and an NCAA star for the third-ranked Bruins, who finish their regular-season home schedule Sunday at 5:30 p.m. against Stanford.
Moors, a graduate student who will compete at Pauley Pavilion one last time Sunday, didn’t need a back handspring to achieve her ultimate dreams.
But could the simple skill make her final year in gymnastics her best yet?
It’s the age most gymnasts get their first taste of elite gymnastics. But at 12 years old, Moors was at a stand still.
Hamstrung by her mental block that caused her body to freeze before most backwards skills, Moors was held out of her training group because she couldn’t complete the requisite skills. Almost every day, she thought about quitting. Coaches told her to just try dance instead.
“It made me feel bad about myself,” Moors said. “I wanted it so bad and I just couldn’t do it. It was so frustrating. … I identified myself only as a gymnast and I couldn’t find my worth.”
Mental blocks in gymnastics became international news when Simone Biles cited “the twisties” when withdrawing from the Olympic team final in Tokyo. The most decorated gymnast in history suddenly lost control of her body mid-air. She said she didn’t think, at that moment, she would ever return to gymnastics.
Moors fought off her own doubt by finding pockets of the sport she could still enjoy. She used any extra moment of practice to master front tumbling. What she lacked in difficulty, she made up for in artistry, developing an attention-grabbing presentation style that became her signature.
“I had to be so clean and precise because I didn’t have the difficulty,” Moors said. “I was like, might as well give them a show if I can’t go backwards.”
Moors was the first Canadian gymnast to win the Longines prize for elegance when she took home the award at the 2017 world championships. Now the NCAA’s top floor performer by average score, Moors pulls spectators forward in their seats with a gravitational-like force.
Nearly defined by a fear of backwards skills, Moors’ style is now best described by UCLA assistant coach BJ Das with a single word.
Fearless.
“She feels the movement, like, in her soul,” said Das, UCLA’s floor choreographer. “Her movement looks perfect to the eye, but there is something where she has to actually let go to make it come to life.”
Moors’ creativity soon started showing in her tumbling, where she built a career on rare combinations almost no one would ever think to put together.
When she was young, she fulfilled the requirement of an acrobatic series on beam by linking a front walkover with a round off. Teammates started learning double back flips. Moors stacked mats into the foam pit and practiced double front flips.
The coaches who once told her she was wasting her time couldn’t help but start to see her Olympic potential.
“There’s ways around it, whether you need to find ways to do the back handspring or you can go forward,” Moors said. “I always joke: ‘Keep moving forward.’”
When Moors was struggling to consistently land a difficult front-tumbling acrobatic series on beam, she and McDonald knew the obvious answer was to substitute a back handspring.
Executing the solution wasn’t as simple as saying it.
Moors has always been her own “worst enemy.” She can still spiral into frustration each time she struggles with her back handspring. Moors feels her body shut down at the thought of flinging herself backward into a space she can’t see. Some practices she can only manage the front aerial and settles for a perfectly executed drill.
Moors began tentatively trying a front aerial, back handspring series on the floor during the summer. When assistant coach Lacy Dagen was hired in August, she began working with gymnasts on beam by breaking their routines down into simple, single-word cues for each skill. Gymnasts visualize their routines using only their mental cues. Before every meet, Dagen reminds the team: “find your arms, find your center, get to your finish.”
Dagen calls it “mental choreography.”
“I think what Brooklyn had was just an overwhelming amount of information in her brain that she couldn’t quite dial down and make simple enough for her to understand how to just go backwards,” Dagen said.
The first-year assistant who competed at Florida and Oregon State knows the feeling. During her own career, Dagen briefly “forgot” how to do a back handspring. Her coaches helped her overcome the mental block by drilling hundreds of back handsprings over and over.
Now 24, Moors knows the same strategy wouldn’t work for her.
Injuries have limited Moors for most of her college career after she overcame herniated discs in her back and nerve damage in her legs to compete at the Olympics. Trainers wondered if she could compete at all this season.
Moors did hours of daily physical therapy and pilates to strengthen her core during the offseason to train on beam again. This is the hardest Moors has ever worked in the gym, she said, because she’s never been able to handle the practice workload.
Feeling stronger than she has in years, Moors wanted to finish her gymnastics career by competing on as many events as possible. She hadn’t competed regularly on beam since 2022. Her tricky front aerial, front handspring series was too inconsistent to trust on meet days.
But Moors, again, found a way.
Mounting the beam during the Bruins’ season opener on Jan. 4, she lined up for her acrobatic series toward the beginning of her routine. Moors flipped herself over through a front aerial. A perfect back handspring followed.
Teammates cheered and clapped. Das grabbed senior Emily Lee’s arm in excitement.
Nothing else in the routine mattered to Dagen. She reached both of her arms above her head when Moors dismounted the beam and wrapped her in a tight hug.
“This was my celebration of everything I worked through,” said Moors, who has competed on beam every meet this season, and has posted two career-best 9.9 scores. “I don’t say it often: I was very proud of myself.”
The post How UCLA’s Brooklyn Moors overcame self-doubt to achieve balance-beam excellence appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
