When Avery Neff collapsed on the floor inside the Huntsman Center toward the end of the University of Utah’s meet against Iowa State on Jan. 17, it seemed likely — if not certain — that her first season as a Red Rock was over just two weeks after it had officially started.
The freshman gymnast had been competing on floor and was almost finished with the final tumbling pass of her routine when her feet slipped out from under her and she punched off the ground using her ankles instead.
After flipping through the air, Neff came back down to earth unable to put any pressure at all on either ankle. Athletic trainers and coaches rushed to tend to Neff while 10,000-plus fans sat in stunned silence, an eerie quiet descending on an arena usually bursting at the proverbial seams with piped-in music combined with the joyous squeals of thousands of little girls seeing their idols up close.
After what felt like an eternity for those on hand, Neff was carried off the floor and into the underbelly of the arena, her parents Brandon and Tonya Neff quickly following.
Neff didn’t return for the rest of the meet, nor did she compete in Utah’s next three competitions after announcing she had suffered “severe” ankle sprains.
In the immediate aftermath of the injury, Neff sported soft casts on both ankles and used a walker to get around. More often than moving, however, she sat on the padded seat of the device. When she did move it was more like a geriatric than a top-tier NCAA athlete.
And that is what Neff is.
The highest-rated women’s college gymnastics recruit ever — according to College Gym News’ rankings — Neff was the No. 1 overall prospect in the 2024 class, which garnered her interest from powerhouses like Oklahoma, Florida and LSU, along with Utah.
From the moment she stepped foot on campus of the University of Utah, expectations were that she would be one of the best — if not the best — gymnasts Utah has to offer on a team that includes multiple Olympic medalists.
Her ankles threatened that promise at least temporarily, but potentially in the long term.
Less than a month removed from the incident, though, Neff was back competing. Last Friday night against Arizona, Neff was in the lineup for Utah on the uneven bars.
Many watched in disbelief as Neff performed a competitive routine just weeks after suffering an injury that even she believed had probably ended her season.
“Beforehand, I definitely thought my season was over,” Neff said.
For those that know her best, though, the episode is perhaps the most public display of who Neff is, and why she seems destined to be the next great Red Rock.
Journey to Olympus
At 9 years old, Neff wasn’t all that different from your average young gymnast. A native Utahn from South Jordan, she attended Hunt’s Gymnastics Academy in Midvale and was, by all accounts, doing just fine there.
Well, except for the fact that she had a tendency to try new skills with a little bit of reckless abandon — “That girl will do anything,” Brandon Neff said — often without anyone spotting her.
She also had dreams of being a college gymnast one day. She would see the billboards of Utah gymnasts along the I-15 corridor and imagine her future, though she admits she didn’t think that future would happen at Utah, if it happened at all.
“I was not the best gymnast when I was younger,” Neff said. “I didn’t really take it super seriously, so I never thought that I’d even have the chance to be a Red Rock.”
If not Utah, though, maybe she could become a Utah State Aggie or a BYU Cougar or a Southern Utah Flippin’ Bird one day. That was the thought when her parents decided to move Neff to Olympus Gymnastics, a more expensive gym but arguably the best club gym in Utah.
Neff would be coached by former Red Rock Jessie Duke McDonough at Olympus, and gym owner Ryan Kirkham was known for bringing in college gymnastics coaches to see his gymnasts.
All in all, it seemed like the right move for Neff’s future.
Upon her arrival at Olympus, McDonough didn’t exactly agree. It was difficult for her to believe that Neff had a real future in the sport at all.
Recalled Kirkham: “I remember when she came in, she was unbelievably weak. ... She was sloppy as can be, and after about a month of her being here Jess comes up to me, and she goes, ‘Why did you let this kid come? She is so sloppy. She doesn’t follow direction. She doesn’t do the assignments that I’m giving her.’”
McDonough admits that at the time she trended toward Type A athletes who stuck to a plan and were very structured in how they trained, and Neff, well, she was about as far from that as you could be.
Kirkham told Brandon and Tonya at the time that Avery would “huck and chuck,” meaning she would try new skills without having mastered even the basics of the sport.
It was dangerous, which was one of the reasons her parents moved her to Olympus, and McDonough simply couldn’t see how Neff would amount to anything.
“I remember saying, ‘I don’t know how,‘” McDonough said.
Kirkham saw a diamond in the rough, though.
Olympus had a national championship winning gymnast at the club already when Neff came on board, and yet Kirkham told McDonough that Neff would be the best gymnast at the club within three years of her arrival.
“He was right,” McDonough said. “I mean, he was right.”
Hard work wins out
What did Kirkham see from Neff that inspired such confidence?
Neff was admittedly not a good gymnast at the time. “I knew that I wasn’t naturally gifted,” Neff said. “... So I just didn’t take it very seriously.”
She was, however, willing to try pretty much anything. Kirkham called her coachable in the sense that she was willing to give anything a shot. More than once too.
“She was eager, she was hungry,” Kirkham said. “We had years of development to go with her, but she was always the kid who would say, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it. Let me try. Can I do this?‘”
Neff would fail more often than not, “crash and burn,” as Kirkham described it, and sometimes she had to be talked out of trying things that could seriously hurt her, but she continually kept trying.
Again and again.
Neff, Kirkham and McDonough credit her attitude, that willingness to keep trying, to her dad.
If there was one thing that Brandon Neff wanted to instill in his children — Avery and her older brothers Boston and Carson — it was the importance of hard work.
A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Brandon believes that his family has been blessed, and with those blessings come a real need, a responsibility even, to serve others, which takes work — hard work.
“I just want to teach my kids to work,” he said. “We’ve got a good life, and I’ve told them, ‘You’re blessed with a lot of things, but let’s go. I want to teach you to work.‘”
Brandon also strongly believes that you have to sacrifice to get what you want in life, a belief he has taught his children.
“I believe there’s an eternal principle in life and beyond,” he said. “I believe that it’s tied with everything. If you sacrifice, there’s blessings, and you have to be willing to sacrifice in everything. What you do want, and what are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want?”
Those two ideas — hard work and sacrifice — became a part of Avery Neff, a core part of her character.
“He just engraved in my brain that when you tell yourself something, you can make it happen,” she said. “You just have to keep telling yourself that and motivate yourself to do that and work hard for that.”
It was Avery Neff’s work ethic and willingness to try anything that made Kirkham believe she had real promise, even when everything else said she didn’t.
Must-watch gymnast
After a couple of years at Olympus, Neff made her way up to Level 10, the level of gymnastics most gymnasts compete at prior to moving to the NCAA level.
She still wasn’t anything special as a gymnast yet, though. In fact, her promotion to Level 10 only came about when multiple Level 10 gymnasts at Olympus got hurt and Kirkham and McDonough decided to move Neff and a few other gymnasts from Level 9 up.
“We were just trying to shift things around,” McDonough said.
With her promotion, though, Neff began training alongside the best gymnasts at Olympus, including future Cal star Milan Clausi — the daughter of Utah great Missy Marlowe.
At that point, McDonough said, a flip switched for Neff.
She learned a variety of skills in a month-and-a-half that most Level 10 gymnasts take two or three years to learn. In short order, Neff was as good as any gymnast at Olympus, just as Kirkham had predicted.
“Because of the raised expectation and her trying to be just as good as the other girls, she just figured it out,“ McDonough said. “That’s where she thrives, is being challenged.”
It wasn’t just at the gym where Neff was being challenged. She told her dad one day after being picked up from practice that she wanted to be a national champion and Brandon thought she was crazy.
“I remember I just started laughing in my mind,” he said. “I thought, ‘There’s no way on earth.’”
Avery disputes this version of the story, by the way. She claims that Brandon was the first one to bring up her winning a national championship. Either way, it quickly became a regular thing — when Brandon would pick Avery up from practice, for them to talk about her becoming a national champion. It became almost something of a ritual, the pair speaking her dream into existence.
And her aspirations quickly went from being unbelievable to quite believable. By her second year as a Level 10 gymnast, Neff was a national champion in the all-around.
Her third year, she finished second in the all-around competition at the national championships but tied for first on floor, and in her fourth year she was back on top with another all-around national title.
It got to the point that Neff became simply must-watch, on floor especially.
“As soon as that girl stepped on the floor, the place would go completely silent,” Brandon said. “Girls came from everywhere and would swarm that floor. Everybody would stop. ... They did that for the last few years. People would go crazy. She had lines of girls wanting to get autographs.”
Why Avery Neff is destined for greatness
Soon, Neff went from being just another gymnast at Olympus to the best college gymnastics prospect of the 2020s. All the best programs and coaches wanted her.
It was nothing short of remarkable, all things considered.
“Even though I didn’t love (coaching) her in the beginning, she worked,” McDonough said. She worked quickly, it just wasn’t intentional, but it was constant, and she learned that if she thinks about doing every time that she’ll get somewhere, and no one matches her pace.”
Beyond her work ethic, though, Neff has real strengths, traits that have enabled her to become the gymnast she is today, which is potentially the next star at Utah.
For one, she loves gymnastics, and that love for the sport shines through during every routine, adding a performance quality to her gymnastics that few have.
“A lot of moms have come up to me and they will say, ‘She just looks like she enjoys it so much,’” Tonya Neff said. “She does. She loves it so much. She enjoys what she does. She enjoys working hard, she enjoys performing. She just enjoys gymnastics so much.
“It brings her so much happiness, and it just kind of exudes when she performs. Everyone sees it. I feel like maybe that’s why people are drawn to her when she performs, is because she just looks like she loves it so much.”
Neff also has a competitive drive that rivals anyone’s. She wants to win. Badly. Every time she competes.
“She was just so goal-oriented and driven,” Kirkham said. “She’s quite possibly the most competitive kid we’ve ever coached.”
As far as her actual gymnastics abilities go, she isn’t a naturally powerful gymnast, per se, but she has an awareness that is off the charts.
“She knows exactly where she is (in the air),” Kirkham said. “Her awareness is incredible. I remember one day she came in and she hadn’t even tried a layout full ever. She’d never tried it, but the mats were stacked up and she goes, ‘Ryan, do you think if I ran down there and tried the full onto the mats that I’d make it?‘
“I said, ‘No.’ Then she goes, ’Well, can I try?‘ And I said ‘Absolutely,’ so she runs down there. Not only does she make it, she comes out of it. She’s flying backwards out of it. I learned then that when she twists, she actually speeds up.”
Clausi was around Neff for years at Olympus before leaving for California for her now-finished college gymnastics career, and as she tells it, Neff is just trying to stay humble when she says she isn’t all that talented or gifted.
“She can be humble all she wants, but she is insane,” Clausi said. “She has an incredible understanding of her body She has an incredible understanding of just the physics of gymnastics. Like, it was baffling.”
Neff is, Clausi said, able to compete new skills on the spot, as long as she is told what is wanted.
“You’d be like, ‘Hey, this is what I want to see here,’ and she could just do it,” Clausi said. “It just made so much sense to her. It was incredible to watch her kind of come into her body and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
“She has an incredible understanding of the sport, which is so rare to see someone have that inherent knowledge like she did. She really just understood.”
On the college gymnastics scene, Neff’s personality is a gift, too. She is, in a word, caring — almost to a fault — which in a sport where gymnasts have spent the majority of their careers competing for themselves isn’t a guarantee.
“She truly cares about the people around her and is really good to people,” McDonough said. “She just cares.”
Grace McCallum, one of Neff’s current teammates at Utah, agrees.
“She is just so genuine, so kind, so wholesome,” McCallum said. “I’ve never met anyone like her. She is truly one of a kind.”
Clausi believes Neff will become the leader of Utah’s program as a result, and quickly — not because of any conscious effort, just because of who she is.
“I think she’s really going to kind of find herself (in college) and really find herself in a leadership position on that team,” Clausi said. “Probably not by any intentional effort.
“She just kind of has that confidence about her, that swagger, and just such a solid head on her shoulders. She loves what she’s doing and it’s completely contagious.”
“She just kind of has that confidence about her, that swagger, and just such a solid head on her shoulders. She loves what she’s doing and it’s completely contagious.”
— Milan Clausi on Avery Neff
Neff isn’t perfect, of course. She admits that the ankle injury she suffered last month has been hard, a significant enough challenge that it affected her mindset, her ability to keep hope.
“I progressed really quickly (with rehab) and then kind of got stuck,” Neff said. “Nothing was feeling better and that was when I lost a lot of hope. (Utah head coach) Carly (Dockendorf) could see me in the gym and my mannerisms were kind of taking down the team, too.”
Dockendorf said Neff has been tested. Injuries are hard, and pain isn’t enjoyable — especially the kind Neff has dealt with — nor is it fun to go from competing as well as any Utah gymnast to start the season to watching meet after meet from the sideline.
“For someone who hasn’t really had to sit out (in her career) for injury, it is a really new space to be in,” Dockendorf said.
Throw in that Neff is a freshman, a year almost any college athlete will tell you is the most difficult, and it wouldn’t be that surprising if Neff doesn’t become everything everyone expects this season.
Odds are that she will etch her name into the history books as one of the best Utah gymnastics has ever seen, though.
She’s just that kind of gymnast.
“She’s worked her butt off to be as good as she is,” Clausi said. “That’s a kid that has a crap ton of talent, but she is so honed in and so driven.
“She’s focused as heck. Everything that she does has a purpose, and it’s all driven towards being the absolute best athlete that she can possibly be.”
