BYU hopes to fly high

Though they finished with the No. 28 women's national gymnastics ranking last year, the Cougars are looking to come back strong this season as they keep their fingers crossed that they suffer no more serious injuries as the season rolls along.

Last season found Hayley Jensen, Kylee Draper and Alethea Boon all fighting serious injuries and missing time, with Jensen and Draper not competing for the entire first half of the season and Boon sitting out at regionals.

This year, BYU coach Brad Cattermole is hoping his core group will be basically healthy and performing all of their solid routines by midseason. But the team will be missing a key piece of the future as freshman Jessica Villegas, who Cattermole says will be a solid all-around performer for years, is out for the season and using a medical redshirt with a dislocated elbow, which she injured while doing an "easy" move on the uneven bars.

"She would have done three or four events this year, and we are planning to have her compete all-around for us in the years to come," said Cattermole of his new star. The Cougars have been throwing out plenty of specialists for the past few years and are looking forward to having a person who likes and is capable of performing for them in the all-around. But he'll have to wait one more season for Vallegas.

This year the Cougars are bringing back Dayna Smart-Allen, who has been leading the team in three events for years and just added the bars to her bag of tricks last season.

"Bars are not her thing, but she's good at bars," Cattermole said of the gymnast he hopes to have competing in the all-around regularly by midseason.

She'll probably be joined there by Alethea Boon, who is still nursing some injuries from years past and is recovering from two surgeries in the offseason. She was tumbling on a bad wrist, hand and leg and unable to compete by the end of last season, but her recovery is going faster than the Cougars could have hoped.

"She's taking it slow and easy, and she couldn't even work out until mid-December, but she's just so fundamentally strong," Cattermole said of his gymnast from New Zealand.

He'll bring her back into the fray gradually, adding events along the way. She won't be on the floor for a while, and it might take some time to get her competing on beam again as well.

Kylee Draper-Marvin should also be back after missing time last season and competing in her three events — bars, beam and floor. Her specialty is bars, and the Cougars missed that expertise during the first half of last season.