Taylor Ingle says she was a clumsy kid. Her parents wanted her to develop more coordination, so they signed her and her two sisters up for gymnastics. As soon as she tried the sport, it was love at first sight.
Now, a decade and a half later, Ingle is a junior on the Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO) Gymnastics team who was named the Midwest Independent Conference (MIC) Co-Gymnast of the Year, earning five all-around titles of the season with a score of 39.000 or higher, with a score of 39.200. Ingle also placed second at the Women’s Gymnastics Collegiate National Invitational Championship (WGCNIC) Individual Finals in April.
She says it’s been a season of highs and lows for her, where she’s had some of her highest highs and also made mistakes within the sport she hasn’t made in the past. With a tendency to be hard on herself in a sport that asks its athletes to earn scores that are perfect 10s, she says she’s learning to focus on the highs rather than the lows.
The desire to be perfect can creep into areas of life beyond gymnastics, Ingle says.
“From the age of 5, we’re told we’re supposed to be perfect, and that kind of gets drilled into your head and bleeds into every aspect of your life, not just gymnastics. So, I think even in school and in our social lives, we want everybody to view us as perfect essentially, which isn’t a realistic expectation for ourselves. So, it can be very difficult when we’re not getting the scores we want or seeing the results that we want, the grades that we want. Even it goes into we want everyone to like us — it’s perfect in every aspect,” Ingle says. “I think it’s just more [about] finding happiness in the fact that you get to do [gymnastics]. … It’s finding the joy in the failure and in the highs and less in the scores and the numbers and the grades and whatever it might be.”
The sport of gymnastics asks the impossible: to be perfect while reaching, exploring and expanding the limits of what the human body is capable of. The mats around the gym are a testament to the expectation of falling and failure. Braces and scars, fractures and surgeries are common, a testament that the athletes who succeed at high levels are willing to risk injury and sacrifice their bodies for their love of the sport. Imperfection is the path on the quest for achievement.
According to the NCAA Women’s Gymnastics website, the vault, bars, beam and floor routine events in college gymnastics are scored by judges who evaluate a routine “based on how well-executed or close to ‘perfection’” it is, based on minimum set requirements for difficulty levels, composition and execution of the routine.
For vault, deductions are made from a starting score of “10;” for the other three events, routines that meet basic requirements start from a score of 9.4, and gymnasts must perform difficult skills rated a D or E on an A to E difficulty rating scale to earn additional points to achieve a perfect 10. Deductions can be made for mistakes such as stepping out of bounds on a floor routine, going overtime on a beam routine, and taking a step or hop when landing.
“It is almost a sport of failure, because we are striving for perfection,” SEMO Gymnastics head coach Ashley Lawson says. “We are striving for that perfect 10, but the likelihood of getting that perfect 10 in such a subjective sport is very hard. And so for them, we tell them to not be so fixated on the score and just do our gymnastics like we know how.”
And the women have no off-season: Pre-season begins in September, and the athletes are allowed to train for 20 hours a week, training for longevity and quality over quantity. During these months, they practice four times a week, lifting weights twice a week for an hour and practicing in the gym three hours a day on weight days. Their competition season lasts from January to April, and they have 13 meets plus post-season during that timeframe, competing every weekend and sometimes twice in one weekend. During season, they train two days a week and travel to meets around the country.
This past season, Lawson says the team started off slower than they would have liked, but built on that at each meet, earning third place and their highest team score at WGCNIC in April. Some of their season highlights include competing against Olympians Jade Carey and Joscelyn Roberson and competing with Big 12, Southeastern Conference (SEC) and Mid-American Conference (MAC) schools. They also competed in some of the biggest venues in the country, including the Fort Worth Convention Center and MIZZOU, and at home, they had two sellout crowds. They enjoy giving back to the local community through service.
The athletes say failure helps them learn how to fix a skill and what not to do in the future if they’re in a similar situation. It also causes some gymnasts to get mad, and they channel that emotion into practicing the skill more. Others cope with failure by taking a step back and starting over to relearn how they think about the skill by talking with coaches, realizing that particular day may not be the day they master it.
These lessons translate to life outside of the gym, too.
“Failure in gymnastics, it’s a big motivator for me, so I think it’s the same in life,” Ingle says. “When I make mistakes, it makes me better, and I think that applies through all aspects of my life. And knowing that that mistake didn’t define me and the results of that day aren’t the results of the next day. So, just kind of letting myself move on from it and get a new vision of who I want to be and setting my sights on that instead of on who I was.”
Being a part of a team rather than an individual gymnast helps build a system of support for the days when she’s out of energy, Ingle says. It also motivates her to give as much as she can to her teammates to help them grow and succeed, too.
Leah Parton, a sophomore on the team, knows the value of having teammates to rely on. A gymnast since the age of 4, last year, she wasn’t sure if she would continue her gymnastics career. A former student at Lindenwood, the university cut their gymnastics program in 2024, leaving her without a team.
Throughout the summer, she trained, sent out videos and emailed coaches around the country by herself, unsure if her efforts would bear fruit. Although she says at certain points while in the transfer portal, she didn’t know if she wanted to keep going, Lawson invited her to SEMO’s campus, and Parton says she could tell the team was something she wanted to be a part of.
Now, she says she is glad she didn’t give up on herself.
“With a new team and everything like that, I was like, ‘I’m going to have to relearn everything, this is just going to be starting over,’” Parton says. “But it’s the complete opposite — I feel like I’ve been here forever, and I love everything about competing. I love traveling with the team, I love the meet days, I love the day before meet practices, I love it all. They make all those hard days worth it to me.”
Janelle Lopez, a senior on the team, started the sport at 6 years old when her parents gifted her with tumbling classes for her birthday because she “wouldn’t stop jumping on the couch and hanging on the table.” After one of the classes, her coach told her mom that they needed to put Lopez in “real gymnastics” because she was strong, and it would be a waste of talent if they didn’t. So, her parents did.
In the past, Lopez has fractured both of her tibias and had shin surgeries. This season, she dislocated her knee. Taken out of the gym on a stretcher, she thought it would be the end of her gymnastics career.
But with hard work and dedication to physical therapy, she was able to put on a leotard and exhibition — or do her routine without it counting towards the team’s score — at her Senior Night meet. Lawson says it was an emotional moment for everyone on the team, to see Lopez’s resiliency and the way she defied the odds to do what she loves again. This year, she was honored with the Sylvia Keiter Award, which recognizes a gymnast in the MIC who displays a hard work ethic, dedication and selflessness throughout the season.
Lopez says during the time she wasn’t able to compete, it was important to her to be there for her teammates, to support them from the sidelines. They also helped her with the mental aspects of gymnastics as she worked to make her comeback.
Lopez coaches tumbling at a local gym. Teaching younger girls helps her to be gentle with herself, she says: For example, when she sees one of her 8-year-old students being hard on herself for falling, she works to help the student see her progress rather than her failure. This helps Lopez to see the 8-year- old version of herself inside of her own self, focusing on everything she’s learned how to do since then.
Teaching shows her that just because she can’t master a skill on a certain day doesn’t mean she’ll never be able to do it. And it helps give her perspective.
“We chase something that’s not realistic, really,” Lopez says. “I mean, what even is the definition of perfect? Your perfect is not my perfect.”
Lopez often asks herself and her teammates if something will matter in five or 10 years. If the answer is yes, then it’s worth paying attention to. If the answer is no, they can accept the mistake and let it go. At the end of the day, no matter what happens, she reminds her teammates they’re all going to get to eat dinner.
It’s important to remember nothing is given out in life, Lopez says; one has to work for it. And that work takes perseverance. That’s what gymnastics teaches her.
“Don’t let obstacles stop you,” Lopez says. “It’s like a hurdle: You can go up, around and under them. So, even if you fail one time, don’t let it stop your dream and your goals. You’ve just got to go through it.”
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