The payoff for Kelly Parkinson will come Saturday, if she can help her 11th-ranked BYU gymnastics team qualify at the West Regional in Los Angeles for the NCAA Championships April 19-21 at Georgia. The payoff for Parkinson could be even bigger if the Y. qualifies, and if she can help her Cougars finish higher than the 11th place they took last year.
The payoff for Parkinson comes in doing what she sets her mind to doing, not in dollars — the way it does for her older sister Holly, the professional tennis player.
Holly and Kelly Parkinson both played tennis and did gymnastics as kids. In fact, the Parkinson family once moved to Houston so the girls in this five-girls-and-two-boys household could seriously train in both sports.
Holly, who attended BYU for a while before turning pro and being ranked as high as 82nd in the world, eventually chose to follow tennis. She still stands among the world's top 100 despite an injury.
Saying she "just liked gymnastics better," Kelly has logged some world traveling in her chosen sport, having competed as an elite in Australia, Italy and Guatemala.
Now Kelly is ranked fifth in the NCAA in the all-around with a regional qualifying score of 39.505 and a school-record career best of 39.625 in each of her last two meets.
"We always joke about who thinks which sport is harder," Kelly says.
Gymnastics doesn't pay like tennis, but Kelly says she made the right choice and doesn't mind.
Most of the time.
"A lot of times," Kelly admits with amusement, "I'm like, 'Well, that's unfair' because she's making tons of money and can do that for her career, but gymnastics will basically be kind of over after college. That would be my only regret. Gymnastics isn't something you can do when you're older like other sports, like golf. You can golf your whole life."
A business major with a 3.55 grade average and an emphasis in finance, Parkinson will probably figure out how to make something pay for her after gymnastics. She's a junior, with a little more than a season of the sport left in her collegiate career.
Right now, though, she's living up to the expectations she had of herself several years ago when she entered BYU after turning down offers from Arizona State, Georgia and Utah because she wanted the "atmosphere of the Church" in her college life.
Her first year was spent acclimating to the feel of college and trying to come back from a mid-season hyper-extended knee. Parkinson made some noise as a sophomore, setting the school all-around record at 39.55, tying the school floor exercise mark at 9.95 and making All-American by placing 16th at 39.10.
This season, Parkinson rarely wavers. "Each meet, there's room for improvement," she said.
She's been highly ranked all season, 39.10 being her lowest score of 2001. She started off with 39.325, 39.25 and 39.225, which put her sixth in the country, even if she didn't know it.
"When I saw the ranking, I was like, 'Wow!'" Parkinson said. "It gave me a lot more confidence. I didn't know where I stood (against the country's best)."
Parkinson has hit 39.50 and above in five of her last six all-arounds and is just .085 in RQS behind national leader Mohini Bhardwaj of UCLA, whom she'll see this weekend as the Cougars enter the West Regional as the second-seeded team to the hosting Bruins.
UCLA has much of the 2000 U.S Olympic team on its roster, but the top two teams advance to the NCAAs.
Parkinson might have had the ability to have made an Olympic team, but it wasn't really an option for her because she was the wrong age. To have been in the Sydney Olympics, she'd have had to delay college for more than two years. She trained hard at Houston's Cypress club — even spending her sophomore year of high school being home-schooled so she could concentrate more — and she was a three-year elite and member of the U.S. National team.
By the time she was a high school senior, though, "I was ready to go to college," she says. Her body would welcome the lighter training schedule, and she was ready to have at least a little social life.
Now, the whole Parkinson clan—after years in the military, moving from place to place - has settled in Alpine for the skiing. And Kelly's gymnastics.
E-MAIL: lham@desnews.com