8 — Thursday, January 9, 2020
michigandaily.com
The first phone call was from a former
athlete to the coach she loved.
Elise Ray was at a crossroads. After
finishing her career as a gymnast
at Michigan, she’d performed
for Cirque du Soleil for three
years, then worked briefly as
a trainer and broadcaster.
Like many athletes
whose careers had
come to an end, Ray
wasn’t sure what
was next. So she
called Bev Plocki,
her college coach,
and asked for
advice.
“I haven’t really
found that thing
that I love,” Ray
told her.
Plocki responded:
“Elise, in my
opinion, you were
born to coach
gymnastics.”
It was the
first of three
phone calls
that came to
define Ray’s
career.
A decade after
that first call of
advice, the two
women — at the
helm of their
own programs
in Michigan and
Washington —
scheduled a meet
against each other.
It should have been
perfect, a coach and her
protege, reunited where it all
began, this time as competitors.
Except, in a twist of irony, Ray —
now known as Elise Ray-Statz
after getting married in
2017 — is pregnant and
due in a few weeks.
She wasn’t cleared to
travel to Ann Arbor.
But Plocki has
no doubt that the
Washington team
she’ll be seeing
Saturday, part
of a tri-meet
with Texas
Woman’s, will
have Ray-Statz’s
fingerprints all
over it.
Elise Ray hadn’t
been any average
gymnast.
She was a star.
She trained under legendary coach
Kelli Hill, reached the elite level as
a teen, then won a USA Gymnastics
national championship at the age of
18. Later that year, she went to the
Olympics.
The 2000 Olympics were in Sydney
in September. Ray was selected as one
of six gymnasts to represent the U.S,
the team captain of what was supposed
to be a follow-up to the “Magnificent
Seven,” which four years earlier had
become the first American team to win
Olympic gold. There were heaps of
expectations.
Everything went wrong.
Ray dislocated her shoulder during
the competition. She competed through
it, but wasn’t the same. Not only did
the team fail to defend its gold, it came
away without a single medal (at least
until a decade later, when the team
was awarded a bronze medal due to
the retroactive disqualification of the
Chinese team).
In the all-around final, officials
accidentally set the vault two inches too
low. After sitting both her vaults, Ray
fell off the beam. Though she got a do-
over on the vault, the beam score stood,
and she finished 13th.
“It was a very heartbreaking
experience in Sydney just because
the expectations were really high for
us and so many things went wrong
on multiple layers, and so we just left
there and came home feeling like a
disappointment,” Ray-Statz said. “ ...
And I just really felt like I wanted to be
done with gymnastics because I was
heartbroken.”
“I just was done.”
But her career was just beginning.
Only three months after getting back
from Sydney, Ray joined the Wolverines
as a freshman. Her first meet was less
than two weeks later.
The second phone call came from a
coach in need.
It was 2011, and Joanne Bowers had
just done the hardest thing she’d ever
had to do: She’d fired an assistant.
Wanting someone to confide in,
Bowers — at the time the head coach at
Washington — turned to Plocki, with
whom she had worked as an assistant
coach at Michigan. Bowers told Plocki
of the sudden opening on her staff and
asked if Plocki knew anyone who might
be interested.
“As a matter of fact,” Plocki told her,
“I don’t know if you can get her to come
to the other side of the world in Seattle,
but I know that Elise Ray is interested
in potentially coaching collegiate
gymnastics.”
As a competitor, Ray had been a
natural observer and frequently asked
questions of her coaches. She knew
how to lead a team, and her name came
with built-in respect. Unlike many
former elites, Ray had always been a
team player, and that stood out from the
beginning.
Maybe, just maybe, Ray thought, this
could be the next step she was looking
for.
Bowers offered her the job, and in
2011, Ray-Statz officially became a
college coach.
The first time she competed on vault
as a Wolverine her freshman year in
2001, Elise Ray did a Yurchenko layout.
Here was the captain of the U.S.
Olympic team, already a national
champion, doing a vault with one-
and-a-half fewer twists than the
one she’d done in Sydney just months
earlier. People expected her to come
flying out of the gate, so it was shocking
when she kept it simple.
But that was part of Michigan’s plan.
Ray had been injured, and she was still
hurting from her Olympic experience.
Plocki wanted to afford her the space to
heal, physically and mentally.
“She’s been through a ton and we’re
trying to give her some space and a little
bit of down time and healing for this,”
Plocki said. “There’s no need for us to
go a thousand miles an hour out of the
gate and I just kept telling her, trying to
reassure her and people who would ask
me, don’t you worry about that. When
she needs to be ready at the end of the
season, she will be ready.”
Sure enough, that very season, Ray
won an NCAA title in the all-around.
And the team environment provided
Ray with the tools she needed to truly
heal.
In college gymnastics, rosters are
bigger, so gymnasts only have to
compete on their strong events. The
lowest score on every event is dropped.
And the best teams require high-level
contributions from everyone.
Ray struggled to open up to her
coaches and teammates about her
experience in Sydney, but people could
sense that something wasn’t right.
So they helped convince her that this
experience would be different.
With Michigan, Ray wasn’t expected
to be perfect. She wasn’t Elise Ray,
Olympic Gymnast. She was just one of
the Wolverines.
“You are competing for your
teammates, you’re competing for your
university, and that’s a very different
feeling than I ever had competing in
gymnastics,” Ray-Statz said. “And it
was incredible because you’re doing
something beyond yourself, which is
always more motivating.”
Ray quickly gained respect among
her teammates. She cheered on their
successes as much as her own. If she
believed Michigan could do something,
everyone did.
Plocki likened Ray’s college journey
to the stock market. There were always
ups and downs. It wasn’t a straight
upward trajectory; things like this never
are.
But everyone noticed that the Ray
who joined the Wolverines wasn’t the
Ray who left them.
When she competed, Ray’s eyes began
to sparkle and her face began to glow
again. Little by little, Plocki watched as
Ray regained her love for gymnastics
and grew into the best gymnast the
program had ever had.
Ray set numerous Michigan
records, winning 14 All-American
honors and three individual national
championships while leading the
Wolverines to the Super Six finals three
times. But the part that will always
stick with her is the transformative
environment her coaches created.
Plocki and Sherman, too, say their
greatest accomplishment with her
wasn’t the titles she won, but the spark
she found.
Though she never questioned her
decision to come to Michigan, Ray was
ready to be done with the sport after
the Olympics. At the conclusion of her
Wolverines career, she wanted a way to
stay involved.
Michigan had given Ray a place where
she could fail. A place where she could
heal. A place that planted the seeds for
the next stages of her life.
In 2016, Bowers stepped down to be
closer to family. Ray was offered the job.
So she turned to Plocki, the woman who
had helped her find love in gymnastics
again, looking for guidance. That was
the third phone call.
“What do you think?” Ray asked.
“What do you mean, what do I think?”
Plocki responded. “There are so many
people around the country that have put
in years and years and years as assistant
coaches that would die, a Division I,
Pac-12 head coaching position is gonna
fall into your lap and you’re calling me
asking me, ‘What should I do?’ ”
Ray had always been a homebody. She
wanted a family and children, and she
wasn’t sure how a head-coaching career
would fit into that. But if there was
anyone who knew how to juggle those
considerations, it was Plocki, who’d
successfully balanced coaching and
family life for years.
“The beauty of being a head coach,
Elise, is that you have the ability to
create, to build your staff in a way that
works for you,” Plocki told her during
the conversation.
Plocki assured Ray that she could
juggle family life with gymnastics. All
she needed was to be upfront about her
desire and hire assistants who could
take some of the stress off, particularly
in recruiting. So Ray took the job.
Washington isn’t the easiest place to
win in gymnastics. Ray-Statz’s Huskies
have to compete with Pac-12 powers
like UCLA, Stanford and Utah. But in
her first season at the helm in 2017, Ray
was named the Pac-12 Coach of the Year
after leading Washington to nationals
for the first time in 19 years, where
it finished eighth — the second-best
placing in program history. The next
year, the Huskies followed that up with
another record-breaking eighth-place
finish, this time in the regular season,
and won the floor championship at
NCAA Regionals.
Last year, Michigan’s coaches found
out that an opponent they’d scheduled
had pulled out of a meet. So they sent
out an email to the coaching body,
asking if anyone was interested in filling
the empty date.
Texas Woman’s was the first to
respond. But when Ray-Statz and her
staff got the email, they couldn’t let
the opportunity pass. So the dual meet
became a tri-meet, with the Huskies
added in.
No one knew when the meet was
scheduled that Ray-Statz would
be eight months pregnant and she
wouldn’t be cleared to travel with the
team.
But maybe that’s a testament to
everything Ray-Statz took from her
former coach. Plocki showed Ray-Statz
how to find a passion for gymnastics
again. She served as a model for how
to lead a program and how to foster
gymnasts’ growth. And she told Ray-
Statz that coaching was something she
was meant to do — and something she
could make work.
There’s something Ray-Statz likes
to call “the Washington bubble.”
When it’s time for a meet, the Huskies
focus only on themselves. The other
team doesn’t play into the equation.
But Ray-Statz knows that during the
meet on Saturday, she’ll be glued to
social media. And for that day, she’ll
closely follow not just her own team,
but Michigan, the place where all this
started.
WASHINGTON COACH
Elise Ray-Statz’s TEAM PREPARES
TO TAKE ON HER ALMA MATER
ARIA GERSON
Daily Sports Editor
One of the Wolverines
Photos courtesy of University of Washington Athletic Department | Design by Jack Silberman