St. Joseph grad Pierson set to compete in all-around for WVU gymnastics
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Gymnastics requires strength, speed, timing, flexibility and myriad physical components working in unison.
But there’s a mental side to the sport as well, and that’s the part Abbie Pierson needed to hone.
The New Kensington native and St. Joseph grad was a Level 10 performer through her youth and high school. She always considered herself to be a power performer, making events such as the floor exercise and vault her calling cards. She was well-versed in the other disciplines as well, but at about age 14, she said, her ability to execute her routines on the uneven bars left her.
“I just could not throw the skills,” said Pierson, now a junior with the West Virginia gymnastics team. “There was just a part of my brain that didn’t want to do bars. My body and brain were just not clicking.”
She met with a sports psychologist and restructured her bars routine with the help of Ryan Schulz, her coach at Gymkhana Gymnastics in Monroeville.
During her first two seasons at WVU, Pierson contributed points in vault, beam and floor. In the meantime, Mountaineers coach Jason Butts and his staff continued to tweak her bars routine.
Now, Butts said, Pierson is ready to take the next step. She will compete in all-around for WVU for the first time this season. Butts said he wasn’t sure when that would be, but were it not for a covid-19 setback around the holidays, he said, she could have been ready now.
Butts said in the Mountaineers’ fall intrasquad meet, Pierson had the highest score on bars.
“She has basically learned an entirely new uneven bars routine,” Butts said. “It has a lot of unique skills in it that you don’t see a lot, and she’s worked very hard to get there.”
Pierson said there was a lot of trial and error involved while she was working at her club in Monroeville. That continued at WVU as she worked on new releases and dismounts designed not only to get her comfortable on the apparatus again but also get her ready for the demands of college-level all-around competition.
The Mountaineers opened Big 12 competition Friday in Morgantown with a loss to Denver. Pierson tied for third on floor and tied for fourth on vault.
Butts said he anticipates a strong 2022 for Pierson.
“She’s capable of putting up a 9.85 on every event, if not higher,” he said. “She’s going to be our biggest vaulter of the year. Her floor routine is dynamic. Her beam routine is very unique.
“(Bars) is not her strongest event naturally, but she has put in the hours and the blood, sweat and the tears. So she deserves to be in there.”
Pierson said she is looking forward to the new challenge and hoping to help the Mountaineers improve on last season’s 2-7 record. On a personal level, she said she would like to be an All-American before she is through.
Now that she has her brain and body clicking again, that goal could be within reach.
“I think this whole preseason leading up to this competition season, I did a lot of physical work with conditioning and putting in the hours for training,” she said. “But I also have been putting in a lot of mental work, and I feel like this is the best I have felt mentally and physically going into the competition season.”