Everyone knows MaryAnne Kelley is deadly on a gym floor, but here’s a little secret: She’s dangerous on a staircase too.
No, she won’t push you to the bottom, but she will try to beat you to the top.
“I am extremely competitive; I always have been,” Kelley said last week, curled up on a couch in the family room of her family’s Inverness home. “It’s a huge part of my success.
“I’m competitive in everything. Like if I walk up the stairs with someone, I can’t let them beat me.”
That attitude has helped make the Fremd senior gymnast one of the greatest competitors ever in Illinois high school sports as well as the 1998 Chicago Tribune High School Athlete of the Year.
Kelley edged New Trier swimming and baseball star Justin Nyweide, Loyola Academy basketball and tennis standout Olga Gvozdenovic and Zion-Benton track and basketball star Quiande Moore, perhaps the strongest group of challengers in the 16-year history of the Athlete of the Year award.
She prevailed by winning her third straight state all-around title with a record score of 39.175 and by also taking golds in vault, uneven bars and floor exercise, the first two with record scores.
That ran her haul of individual state gold medals to 12 and helped Fremd to an unprecedented fifth straight team title and a meet record score of 152.55.
Kelley will receive her award Monday at the Hotel Inter-Continental Chicago at a dinner honoring outstanding student-athletes.
Few high school athletes have garnered more awards and accolades than Kelley, but competitive fire notwithstanding, winning has been neither everything nor the only thing for her.
Sure, she’ll “race” you to the top of the stairs, but she’ll never let on she’s doing it. Nor will she pout if she should lose.
Kelley desperately wants to win, whatever the activity, but she doesn’t have to. She just has to try.
“I don’t want to do badly,” she said, “but I don’t let it get in the way of friendships. I definitely keep it inside me.”
That doesn’t mean she feels either guilty or apologetic about her love of competition. “It’s a huge part of my success,” she said. “You can’t be a good athlete and not be competitive. It just doesn’t work.”
Gymnastics has worked for Kelley because of a bad/good break that kept her competitive drive from getting out of hand. The break was a severe back injury late in 8th grade that forced her to take a hiatus from the elite-level club gymnastics track she had been on non-stop practically since she could walk.
“I was practicing six hours a day, and my body couldn’t take that,” Kelley said. “I physically couldn’t do most of what I had to do at the elite level.”
She was devastated when a doctor told her to take time off, but she figured she would rest awhile and then return to her club and her pursuit of a spot on the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team.
“There was no way I was doing high school gymnastics,” said Kelley, the daughter of 1968 Olympic gymnast and current Fremd assistant coach Diane Bolin Kelley. “I just never even pictured doing it.”
Slowly, however, that picture came into focus, and it started to look pretty inviting. It started to look like the camaraderie that goes with high school sports and the chance for a more normal social life.
“I was extremely burned out,” Kelley said. “Half of high school is meeting new people and going to parties and dances. Gymnastics is not all I wanted to remember from my childhood.”
She instead has excelled not only in gymnastics but also in track and field, and she has participated in other extracurricular activities. She has had a great time doing all of it.
“Thank God I hurt my back,” she said. “If I wasn’t injured, I probably would not have been in high school gymnastics, and that probably would have been the biggest mistake I ever made.”
Kelley said she respects club gymnasts and the sacrifices many of them make in their quest for the Olympics. She just decided that life wasn’t for her.
“I just don’t think it’s worth it what they go through,” she said.
Four years in Fremd’s program, Kelley said, has taught her to be a team player, and that has become one of the most essential and enjoyable aspects of sports for her.
“High school gymnastics is all the team aspect; club is definitely for the individual,” she said. “It’s great to win for yourself, but I would much rather have a team state trophy than a gold medal for myself.”
Perhaps that’s why she turns a question seeking an explanation for her gymnastics success into a discussion of her attempts to be helpful and complimentary to teammates and opponents.
“You don’t want to be a winner and have people think badly of you,” she said. “How much would it mean if I won state and people hated me, wanted me to lose?”
For Fremd gymnastics coach Larry Petrillo, that attitude has been more than a blessing; it has been a life preserver. Kelley not only is among the most successful Illinois high school gymnasts ever, but no doubt the most publicized, and that can cause enough dissension to sink even the best program.
“MaryAnne’s unquestioned loyalty to the team defused any sort of resentment that might have been kindled,” Petrillo said.
“There was an inordinate amount of attention to one person. We had some (other) great athletes, and MaryAnne was the first to deflect attention. It was a difficult situation, and she handled it very, very well.”
If Kelley is a team player, she is also a clutch player, the athlete Petrillo says he wants competing when a meet is on the line.
“There have been situations when I really needed a big performance from her, and she always, always comes through,” he said.
That may be because Kelley loves to perform, particularly in her specialty, floor exercise, and particularly in front of a big audience–“the A factor,” she calls it.
She plans to turn that trait into a career in broadcasting after attending Minnesota on a gymnastics scholarship, but she also expects to be a part-time gymnastics coach.
“I could never not have gymnastics be a part of my life,” she said. “I guarantee you my kids will be in gymnastics.”
Maybe one will even be an Olympian. Kelley won’t but doesn’t seem to care.
“I do not regret it at all,” she said of her road not taken. “The decision to be a high school gymnast is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
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Kelley’s chronicles
MaryAnne Kelley detailed the closing weeks of her high school gymnastics career in a diary on the Internet. Take a look at: chicago.tribune.com/go/kelley
