'Her attitude is infectious.' Sycamore senior's winning attitude key to overcoming adversity

Tanvi Mayya hasn't had the perfect high school athletic career. The Sycamore senior has competed in varsity-level gymnastics since her freshman year but has dealt with injuries on and off that have changed her competitive course.

Last summer, between her junior and senior years, Mayya sustained the most severe setback that put a speed bump in her senior year goals.

While attempting a new move set on the uneven parallel bars, Mayya landed hard on her right arm with her elbow fully extended. The damaged ulnar collateral ligament sidelined her for the next few months and altered her plans for her final year of competitive gymnastics.

Some high school athletes buckle under the unpredictable changes injuries can bring, but not Mayya.

Her coaches, teammates and friends say Mayya has an outgoing and positive outlook on life.

"She makes everybody around her better. And she's been such a help at Country Day to show them how to deal with situations, how to be resilient, how to not give up, how to take failures as a chance to do better," said Steve Connor, Mayya's high school coach and head coach of the Cincinnati Country Day gymnastics team.

"Her attitude is infectious among all the girls she works out with because she's always smiling, always laughing. If she makes a mistake, she gets upset about it, but she doesn't let it bother her," he said.

Small mistakes are easy for Mayya to shake off. After her elbow injury though, Mayya had moments of doubt.

"I felt really bad for myself (after the injury) because why did this happen have to happen my senior year? This is my worst injury that I've had. Why did it have to happen right before my senior year? So I was not my positive self at the time, because I wanted my senior year to be perfect," Mayya said.

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Her frustration was short-lived though, lasting only until she could chart a new course. With the help of Conner and her club gymnastics coaches at Countryside YMCA, Mayya started adapting to her new limitations and worked to make the most out of her senior year.

Adapt and overcome

Mayya's ligament damage did not require surgery. Instead, she slowly worked toward recovery at physical therapy.

A true student of the sport, as Connor calls her, Mayya worked within her limits to find a way to be competitive.

Gymnastics is one sport where athletes are competing against themselves as much as against others. The sport works off a points system where a gymnast starts with a base value for their expected routine and is then judged on how well they execute each element of the routine.

This system means Mayya and her coaches were able to build routines with high base values while avoiding any move that would put more strain on her elbow.

"(My elbow) is never gonna go back to completely normal unless (I) get surgery, but it's back enough that I can figure out how to compensate for it."

The biggest change to Mayya's routines was the removal of back handsprings from two of her routines. The move was a staple of her beam and floor routines since she learned to land it, and now as a senior, she had to find new ways to compensate for their points and placement.

"It was odd for me to do backhand springs just because I couldn't straighten my arm to what it used to be. Now I just do a roundoff into my (tumbling) pass rather than a roundoff back handspring, which is what I've been doing my entire life."

At the beginning of February, Mayya had all but one of her routines back up to a competitive starting value, the base amount of points awarded for the moves in a routine. The higher the start value (10.0 is the highest), the more advantageous it is for scoring in the competition.

She switched out her back handsprings on beam and in her floor routine while also getting the start value to 10.0 and while she is limited on the uneven bars she was able to reach a 9.7 start value to meet the requirements.

The final piece of Mayya's senior year is her vault routine.

Before the injury, she was working on landing a Yurchenko, a special entry into a vault jump that includes a roundoff and a back handspring, to improve her chances of qualifying for all-around at the state championship. After the injury, she had to focus first on getting back to her "normal" level before she could go back to trying the harder move set.

She got cleared to work on the Yurchenko at the beginning of the year.

"(The first week of February) at my club gym I tried it on the real vault for the first time. I fell down the first two times but on the third one I landed it."

Mayya will perform the new vault along with all her reworked routines at the district championships later this month in hopes of qualifying for the state championships in all four individual events and all-around competition.

She previously qualified in a single event in her sophomore and junior years but has said her goal for her senior year was always to go for all-around competition, something her coach refers to as the MVP category for gymnastics.

Friendly competition

With all her routines set for districts, Mayya has a clearer path to achieving her goal this year, according to Connor. He said he worked closely with Mayya to get her routines in line with other top area gymnasts, working smarter not harder in her quest for the state meet.

"We knew that she was one of the top four scores from last year's district championship so the conversation started last year with looking at it and saying, 'okay, we've got the girl from Williamsburg, we've got Abby (Dittmann) from Turpin, we got Rebecca (Morse) from Beavercreek,'" Connor said. "Looking at all those girls, I put the bug in her ear saying if we make the right adjustments, you have a good chance of winning districts and all around."

As a smaller sport in the Cincinnati area, most gymnasts know one another personally and, according to Mayya, love that they can compete while getting to build lasting friendships.

"We're all friends. Ditty (Abby Dittmann) from Turpin and Becca (Morse) from Beavercreek. Maddie (Witzerman) from Miamisburg, all these girls, most of us, Maddie's not a senior yet, but most of us, we're all seniors, we're all going through this together. It's really exciting to get to compete with them. Not necessarily against them, but with them."

The friendships and camaraderie are what Mayya treasures about high school gymnastics over her experience in the club gymnastics environment.

"My high school team, they're the best people in the world. I love them so much. I love coming back in the winter for the high school season just because the environment is competitive, but it's so friendly. All people that I'm up against, I'm friends with and I know them and I text them outside of gymnastics."

Creativity and competition outside of gymnastics

Besides texting with her friends, Mayya is involved with a lot of other extracurriculars.

The one that takes up the most time after gymnastics is in a similar vein as Mayya competes with the Sycamore High School color guard and winter guard, using her love of movement and excellent hand-eye coordination to excel on the field as much as she does on the mats.

"Tanvi, as a competitor, is extremely dedicated to everything she does," said Kacey Kopack, Sycamore winter guard director. "She strives for greatness and leads others to do the same. She is the type of person who can overcome any obstacle in her way and is always kind, confident and driven on and off the floor."

Color guard in the fall was the first thing Mayya rejoined after her elbow injury and credited that for some of her recovery.

"I started to get back into (color guard) first because it was a lot less impact on my arm. And I think that helped a lot because it was almost like I was doing physical therapy every day on top of the physical therapy that I was doing."

For the winter guard season, happening right now, the school is performing a show called "Entropy," which Mayya has called her favorite show so far.

Following along with the creative nature of color guard and gymnastics, Mayya is also an artist. She paints and does ceramics at Sycamore and recently received two silver keys and three honorable mentions at the scholastic competition.

Not everything Mayya does involves competition, though.

She currently volunteers at the Cincinnati Zoo, where she is in the top tier and is allowed to handle certain animals like the ball pythons, Eastern box turtles, black rat snakes and, her favorites, the rainbow boas.

Her work at the zoo feeds a different passion Mayya holds, one for science, biology and animals. She is the current president of Sycamore's biology club with a keen interest in biochemistry.

This love of science is what Mayya is hoping to focus on after high school. As with most high school gymnasts, more than 99% of them, according to NCAA numbers, Mayya will not compete at the collegiate level and will retire after her club season ends in the summer.

Instead, Mayya will attend the University of Pennsylvania to study biochemistry to become a veterinarian.

College can wait. District competition comes first

For now, though, Mayya is enjoying her final year of high school, making memories with her friends – like watching the movie "Stick It" with her teammates – and competing at her highest level.

As the high school gymnastics season closes, Mayya soon will find out if her hard work and adaptation have been enough to achieve her goals.

Last week, just two weeks out from districts, Mayya felt confident.

"I've been doing pretty well with the meets, So I think I'm on track for (making state). And now with my vault being changed, I should be closer to a 36 all-around score, where right now I'm at a high 35 all-around score. And that's definitely what my goal was. I didn't think I'd, like, be anywhere near getting it. But I am close to getting it, so hopefully it'll happen."

Mayya will have her chance to make it happen on Feb. 24 at Lakota East High School for the Southwest District Championship.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Sycamore gymnast plans to 'stick it' at districts, make run at state