Gymnast healthy and happy
Aggie gymnast Katie Rutherford has suffered many injuries in her four years at USU but it hasn’t stopped her from competing.
Multiple ankle injures over time, have forced her off of the floor routine.
Her first injury came at the beginning of her sophomore year. She said she was in shape and all ready to go, but she tore the cartiledge in her left ankle. Rutherford worked hard and rehabilitated the injury.
“Running is fine,” Rutherford said, but she added her ankles, which aren’t as flexible as they were before her injuries, need to bend more on landings.
Near the end of her junior year she fractured a bone in her right ankle which placed her on crutches for six weeks and made her miss the last five meets of the 2004 season. She said she was just glad it wasn’t her senior year, because she won’t be competing anymore after college.
This year for the Aggies Rutherford competes on the vault, uneven bars and the balance beam. She said she still wants to compete on the floor routine and execute tumbling but she knows it’s safe not to. Rutherford loves tumbling and the floor routine, but, she said, “I’d rather be on the three events than on none.”
Even though she knows it’s not safe, she still would like to and said she sometimes jokes with Aggie gymnastics’ head coach Ray Corn that if he ever needed her, she’d be there.
Although gymnastics is a big part of her life she takes time out of her busy schedule to serve others. Rutherford has acted as one of the three gymnastics co-captains for three seasons.
Along with serving in gymnastics she assists with an annual team service project. Each team at USU has their own project that they carry out every year. The gymnastics team helps with the Community Abuse Prevention Services Agency (CAPSA) by wrapping presents during the holiday season. They set up a booth for one day at the Cache Valley Mall and wrap presents, with all proceeds going to CAPSA.
The team also helps others outisde of Utah by sponsoring a 7-year-old girl from Uganda, Africa. Some of the team helps by donating money to equal $30 a month. The girl lives in an area where there’s a high risk for AIDS and some of the money goes toward AIDS prevention.
“Hopefully they’ll stay with it after I graduate,” Rutherford said about the team’s support for the girl.
Beyond the team’s service she also serves on two athletic committees at USU. She’s the elected president for the Student Athletic Advisory Committee, which meets every two weeks and votes on NCAA legislation and other big decisions for national sports. Rutherford is also one of the many experienced athletes who rotates each week as Student Athletic Mentors.
The mentors help freshman and transfer student athletes assimilate to the athletic community by teaching classes on nutrition, time and stress management, and other helpful topics each week. Following the lecture, Rutherford and others participate in games to meet fellow Aggie athletes.
Rutherford said this year she wants to do more than just the yearly local service. She and the associate athletic director, Mary Ellen Cloninger, have been thinking of helping pay for someone’s higher education. Aggie athletics have approximately 300 athletes each year, if each one donated a dollar they would have $300 to help at least one person pay for college.
“I wanted to reach out a little farther this year,” she said.
Next year she hopes the service will continue because she’ll be graduating in the spring and this will be her last year competing.
Rutherford, an Anthropology major, said mentoring and serving as president of the SAAC has helped her for her future.
“Ideally I’d love to work for a company with a lot of money to spend, and maybe organize their charity work on an international level,” she said.
For this season Rutherford hopes that her senior year is successful for the whole team. She said gymnastics has been her passion for as long as she can remember, and doesn’t like thinking about what life will be like after she has finished competing.
“I can’t even put my mind on anything other than gymnastics. It just makes me depressed,” she said. “I can’t imagine my life without [gymnastics].”
-ranaebang@cc.usu.edu