The brace on Tai Pettiford-Rowan’s right knee weighed her down.

For a gymnast used to flying, the titanium apparatus that weighed roughly three pounds burdened her mind as much as her lower extremities. It reminded her that her surgically repaired knee wasn’t as strong as it used to be after reconstructive surgery. Certain skills scared the Northampton native. She thought about her knee all the time.

“The brace, as weird as it sounds, it held me back. I didn’t feel like myself,” Pettiford-Rowan said.

Who is Tai Pettiford-Rowan? She’s a gymnast. She’s been a gymnast since age three and competed since she entered kindergarten.

The brace and its baggage were necessary because she tore her ACL in October 2021 executing a vault. Pettiford-Rowan landed wrong and partially dislocated her knee. She found out she tore her ACL and meniscus.

The physical aspects of gymnastics became impossible, the tumbling, twisting and turning. Pettiford-Rowan still came to her gym, Western Mass Gymnastics in Agawam, every day.

“It’s very easy to back off and disassociate with everything when you’re injured. She didn’t do that,” said Marlyce Morace, the women’s head coach and owner of Western Mass. Gymnastics. “It is so much of how they identify themselves. They are a gymnast. It’s hard to feel like that when you’re not able to actively participate.”

Pettiford-Rowan encouraged her teammates. She attacked her rehab like the uneven bars, adding elements as she was cleared for them. Her knee strengthened. Her doctor told her she didn’t need the brace any more in November before the competition season began.

“It was at that point that I really started to feel like a gymnast again,” Pettiford-Rowan said. “Once it came off, it was liberating. I was free to tumble and jump and twist and turn, do what I love to do, really.”

She did it better than she ever had before, winning the senior 8 age group (17 and older) all-around at the Women’s Gymnastics Level 9 Eastern National Championships in Kissimmee, Fla., earlier this month. That took winning the vault, the same event that put her in the brace in the first place, taking second in the floor exercise even though she doesn’t like dancing, and adding a fourth-place finish in her personal favorite uneven bars and sixth on the balance beam. 

“It’s so impressive. All of the other coaches from our region and from the area, they said they’ve never seen a kid come off such a major injury and so much time off and be that much better than she was before she got hurt,” Morace said. “She was significantly better than she was before she got hurt. That’s due to her work ethic and how she handled being out.”

Morace never counted her out. She saw Pettiford-Rowan’s potential when she first joined Western Mass. Gymnastics in the fall of 2020 once the gyms re-opened again. Like all gymnasts who couldn’t work out or condition, she was starting almost from scratch.

“She was inexperienced with high level gymnastics. She didn’t know what it looked like or what the training entailed or what the skills were,” Morace said.

Pettiford-Rowan competed at Level 8 for the two previous years before she switched gyms. There are 10 rungs in the USA Gymnastics development ladder that leads to the elite level, which features gymnasts on the Olympic track. Some in the gym questioned Morace like “really?” Even Pettiford-Rowan needed to adjust to the idea.

“She thought gymnastics was something she enjoyed doing. I don’t think she ever thought she could get to where she got,” Morace said. “For a little while, she thought I was a little nuts.”

Pettiford-Rowan qualified for the Level 9 nationals in 2021 and despite not placing well had her best performance of the season.

“I didn’t expect to compete at Level 9 that season, and my coach pushed me to do it, and I proved that I could do it,” Pettiford-Rowan said.

Morace figured she would progress to the level she reached this season in 2021-22 and could move on to level 10 as a senior in 2022-23. Then the ACL tear happened.

Her recovery and the time away from the implements allowed Pettiford-Rowan to miss gymnastics for the first time in more than a decade. She’d spent 20 hours a week training or competing for most of her life. When she returned, she appreciated the minutiae and conditioning like the meets, taking so many extra turns in practice that her coaches had to stop her.

“The sport is so demanding. It takes so much time and energy. You can take it for granted and be tired of it, and it’s frustrating,” Pettiford-Rowan said. “This season I loved gymnastics more than I have, I would say ever, but maybe I loved it this much when I was little.”

She placed at least third in the all-around at every meet this season and won the all-around at the state championships to qualify for regionals. Her third-place finish there with a vault victory propelled her back to nationals.

“She appreciated everything so much more. Kids who have never faced real adversity or never had real injuries, that gets lost on them. They take it for granted,” Morace said. “It’s their joy, it’s their passion, otherwise they wouldn’t spend five days a week, 20 hours a week doing it. It is a very small window. You try and get as much joy and as much out of it as you can in those years that you have with them.”

Nationals was likely Pettiford-Rowan’s last competition. She began on her favorite uneven bars, which used to be a weakness until she drilled it enough to make it a strength, and worked her way through to the vault. The event took a year from her in a sport that doesn’t allow many. She back hand-springed and flipped her way over springboard and flipped over the apparatus, stepping back onto her right knee, brace free, before raising both arms triumphantly.

“It’s hard. I would not have wanted to end my season or career any other way, really. Eastern was the best meet I could ask for,” Pettiford-Rowan said. “It’s really all I wanted was to hit all of my routines and do well for me, and I did that.”

She found Morace after the awards ceremony, gold medal draped around her neck.

“I’m satisfied ending like that,” Pettiford-Rowan told her.

“That means everything to hear that as a coach that they got out of it what they wanted,” Morace said. “It was so incredible that whole competition watching her. She was so excited and she was so happy with what she was doing. She was performing at the level we all knew she should have always been at.”

The realization that her career is over hasn’t fully set in for Pettiford-Rowan. She’ll attend Brown University in the fall, eschewing a gymnastics offer from another institution to attend her dream school. Pettiford-Rowan still takes turns at Western Mass. gymnastics.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ll ever be ready to let it go, but it’s definitely going to be hard. I do feel like I still have potential in the sport. I know that it has to come to an end at some point.”

She’ll be a counselor at Dunkley’s Gymnastics Camp in Vermont over the summer. Coaching at a local gym in Rhode Island sounds appealing.

Even if she’s not competing, Pettiford-Rowan will always be a gymnast.

Kyle Grabowski can be reached at kgrabowski@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter @kylegrbwsk.]]>