Utah's gymnastics coaches have a little extra supervisory work on their plate for the next year or so.
Junior-to-be Ashley Postell has decided to spend at least a month in the Utes' Dumke training center this summer to determine if she will attempt a return to elite-level gymnastics, in addition to her college career.
And incoming freshman Daria Bijak of the German national team plans to train while at Utah toward October's 2006 World Championships in Denmark and perhaps the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
In other Ute news, Kyndal Robarts of San Marcos, Texas, and her club owner/coach, Heather Schnelzer of San Antonio's Aerial Athletics, announced via e-mail Wednesday morning that Robarts has made a verbal commitment to the Ute gym team to be a freshman in the 2007-08 season.
Robarts, a two-time elite who dropped back to Level 10 so she could remain in a traditional high-school setting, finished second all-around in the last two Junior Olympic national meets. She intends to sign an NCAA letter-of-intent during the November signing period.
Postell, the 2002 world beam champion who placed second in the 2006 NCAA all-around and led Utah to a second-place NCAA team finish in April, is in the gym "playing with the new code," said U. coach Greg Marsden.
Drastic changes were made in the past year in the scoring and skill requirements for elite-level gymnastics, and Postell is seeing whether she can make the changes necessary toward qualifying again for the national team. She will have to decide in about a month whether she can be competitive, then attend a camp in Houston and go to the U.S. Classic July 29 in Kansas City, a qualifier to the mid-August U.S. Championships in St. Paul, Minn., which decides the national team.
Bijak, eighth all-around in the 2005 World Championships, is to arrive on campus in August. She told International Gymnast Magazine recently that she hopes to mix college and international competition and that her coach in Germany, Shanna Polyakova, encouraged her to take a college scholarship because there is little professional reward for gymnasts. She was seventh all-around in the March 2006 American Cup at Philadelphia.
"That's the plan right now," Marsden said about Bijak continuing to train for international competitions.
She told IG, and Marsden confirmed, that she works quickly in the gym and currently only trains 22-24 hours a week, not that different from NCAA rules. For additional work, "She could always request we make the gym available," Marsden said.
Gymnasts training for national and international competitions generally work out far more than the 20 hours a week allowed by the NCAA, but Marsden said that they are allowed to do more training and have coaching supervision as long as the workouts are voluntary and of the athlete's own agenda. Coaches, he said, would not be allowed to ask a gymnast to, say, do three more beam routines, but the athlete could do that on her own with spotting and technical advice from the coaches.
MORE ROBARTS: Robarts, 17, who will be a high school senior in the fall, said she chose Utah following a May 19 unofficial visit to the campus. She "fell in love" with the setting, coaches and team members and liked the academic support available.
She also unofficially visited Stanford and Arkansas for competitions or camps the last few years and said she had received interest from several other gym programs, such as Alabama, Stanford, Florida, Missouri and Iowa State.
Robarts is a gym junkie. "I don't know what I'd do without it," she said, though she was once a successful track athlete. "I like to run," she said. She's probably best in the power events of floor and vault but likes beam the most. On floor, she does the double Arabian somersault that Postell used this season at Utah.
Kyndal and a sister took up the sport when their mother, Dawn Robarts (father is Henry Robarts), was teaching at Texas State, which had a gym program. Kyndal was 3. Her sister left the sport in eighth grade and is now a sophomore at the University of Texas. She also has a half brother and half sister who are older.
Kyndal describes herself as "pretty outgoing" and says she likes "to have fun — I'm not very serious."
She didn't have serious Olympic aspirations, and even when she was younger, when people asked about that, she told them, "No, I want to do college gymnastics," though she would have tried for the Olympics, "If I had the opportunity."
E-mail: lham@desnews.com