Many athletes will go a long way to meet a lifelong dream.
In Katie Ferguson's case, it's about a thousand miles a week.
"Gas is so expensive," said the Bloomington North senior, who is now on her third car since she started driving back and forth to the Jaycie Phelps Athletic Center in Greenfield where she has trained six days a week in gymnastics since seventh grade.
Yeah, her folks were thrilled when she got her license. So was she.
"I've gotten so much driving experience," she said laughing. Her weekdays start at North, where she takes four classes, then it's off for the hour and a half or so drive to Greenfield and she's learned all the different ways to get there from here around Indy's frequent traffic backups.
And it's all been worth it when she accepted a full-ride athletic scholarship to compete at Northern Illinois University.
"It's always been in my head since I was age 9 that I was going to do gymnastics in college," Ferguson said. "My parents were both Division I athletes so it just seemed normal to me. I thought about it all the time, but I really got serious about it in seventh grade when I started reaching out to colleges."
The long road ahead
For the last year, her routine has been school, the drive to Greenfield, hour and a half warm-up to start a four-hour practice, then back home around 9:30, dinner and homework. Then she's up to do it all over again.
Her dad Andrew played soccer at Yale while her mom, Elise White was an Ivy League bars champ for the Bulldogs in 1997 and Katie is following in her footsteps.
"I started almost as soon as I could walk," Katie said. At age 7, Ferguson was heading to a gymnastics program in Plainfield and two years later, they switched to the gym in Greenfield, which was opened in 2010 by Phelps, a member of the 1996 gold-medal-winning women's U.S. Olympic Team.
"I tried out and it's been a really good fit," Ferguson said.
Team JPAC has won the state team title 10 years in a row and competes in a regional with other programs in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois looking for berths in the nationals sponsored by USA Gymnastics.
The competition starts in January with nationals in May, but an injury kept Ferguson out of the postseason this year.
"It was pretty bad," she said. "I was in the hospital."
She's attended school part-time much of her life to leave time for her to make it to practices and meets.
COVID was also certainly a setback for her in her eighth-grade year. Stuck at home, she had weekly Zoom meetings with her coaches, who assigned conditioning drills. She could do little else without the equipment available.
"I also grew three or four inches, and that was hard to come back from," Ferguson said. "I lost a lot of skills. I went from a little kid with no pain flipping around to actually dealing with that. I did hold me back. It did a lot of people.
"There were at least 30 of us at Level 10 (the highest on a 1-10 scale), this year, there's only 18."
Ferguson aims for DeKalb
Ferguson was in contact with a bunch of schools, including recent national champ LSU. She went on several visits and talked to numerous coaches during her sophom*ore and junior years.
Bars is her best event (like her mom) and some recruited her just for that event. But she wanted to chance to be an all-arounder. She picked bars as her second best event, though it's the scariest for her, then floor and vault. She does a Yurchenko full, but it just hasn't clicked the same, she said, since the COVID break.
An old teammate of hers from the gym in Plainfield committed to NIU this year, so Ferguson started looking at the school, too.
"I scoped everything out," said Ferguson, who plans to study elementary education. "And Northern Illinois was just the best fit. I talked to my coaches about it and I went to camps to see their coaching styles and what the girls are like on the team.
"As soon as I got the offer, I waited about 30 minutes and said, 'Yes.' It's a full-ride and a lot of the others were walk-on offers."
She is one of five recruits the Huskies, who competed in the Mid-American Conference, picked up and their coach brought them in with the idea they'll be able to help right away. Her goals are to qualify for the NCAA regionals every year and at some point, record a perfect 10 on bars.
"I'll have to put in the work each week to make the lineup," Ferguson said. "It's a huge difference. I have the skills to compete but I have to work on thinking about the team and not just doing it for me and being a team player."
One big adjustment will be going from the individual nature of club gymnastics to a strictly team-first environment.
The other? Having only a short walk to practice once she's on campus.
Contact Jim Gordillo at jgordillo@heraldt.com and follow on X @JimGordillo.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Bloomington gymnast Katie Ferguson puts in miles to earn scholarship
