By Caroline Domecq
LSU Sports Information
She’s only a freshman, but Ashleigh Clare-Kearney has garnered some of the nation’s top honors for the LSU gymnastics team.
Individually she ranks in the Top 10 on both the vault and the floor exercise, listed at No. 9 on both events. She averages a 9.881 on the floor and notches an average of 9.820 per meet on vault.
This individual success is not something Clare-Kearney expected so suddenly, however.
“I really didn’t expect to do so well this soon,” she explained. “I just came in and knew I had a job once I was put in the lineup. I knew they were counting on me to hit and do what I was supposed to do, and that’s what I’ve done. And it’s a great feeling that I was able to be that successful.”
More important than her individual success, Clare-Kearney values how her triumphs are able to help the team as a whole. But at the same time, she knows her mistakes hurt the whole team as well.
“It is more pressure competing at the collegiate level, because if you fall, you’re letting yourself down, your coaches down and your team down,” she said. “It’s not that they’re going to be mad at you, but you’re hurting the team score because they really count on you.”
Despite that added pressure, it is something she welcomes from her previous level of competition, where the focus is placed on individual accolades and not team accomplishment.
“When you compete before college, you are on team, but you’re still more of an individual,” she pointed out. “Your team total didn’t matter as much. My teammates weren’t behind me the same way they’re behind me here. It’s a great push when you know everybody’s behind you 100 percent and wants you to do well.”
An adjustment Clare-Kearney had to make other than simply getting used to collegiate competition was moving from the North to the South. She hails from Manchester, Conn., very different in culture from Baton Rouge.
“It’s so much warmer here than back home,” she said. “I hate the cold, so I love the weather here. The food’s so much different and so are the accents. It’s a good experience though. It’s kind of a culture shock at first, but I’m fitting in good and having fun.”
Clare-Kearney admits that she has fun both in competition and outside of it. However, something that might not be noticed by watching the vivacious competitor, she gets nervous at every meet.
“No matter where I am, I am always nervous, especially in a competition where I am at the end of the lineup and there had been a mistake prior to that,” she said. “There’s even more pressure on you because you know your score will count.”
She does get less nervous for the vault and floor, though, because those are her two best events and the ones she feels most comfortable with.
“I get more nervous on bars and beam than on floor and vault because I just feel more comfortable on those events,” she explained. “Those are the power events, and that’s what I have.”
Clare-Kearney’s floor routine scores as one of the highest on the team consistently. It was choreographed two years ago by Geza Pozsar, a Romanian choreographer who designed routines for Olympians, including Nadia Comanici, Dominique Moceanu and Kerri Strug, to name a few.
She knows it is not merely the technical aspect of her routine that earns high marks, but also how she draws in the crowd and gets them excited.
“The judges are not just looking at your skills,” she said. “They want to see that the crowd’s actually getting into your routine. And when you bring the crowd into it, the judges see that and they want to raise your score as much as they can.”
Her scores are high on both vault and floor, but she is working on her bars and beam routines so she can break into the all-around lineup.
“I’ve talked to the coaches and they want me in the all-around by the end of the season, but it has to be soon because they don’t want to take any chances in a big meet like the SEC Championships,” she said. “But also I know it has to be what’s best for the team. If I’m ready to be in then I will, if I’m not then I won’t, but hopefully I will be.”
Whether or not it is as an all-arounder, Clare-Kearney will be ready to help the team in whatever way she is called for the rest of the season. She and her teammates feel that will be all the way to the National Championship.
“At the beginning of the year we were talking about our goals as a team and it was to make the Super Six and place in the top four,” she commented. “But now we’ve seen such great success that we really believe we can be national champions. Every day we go in there with the motivation and determination to be national champions, and that’s what we have to do.”