Jan. 14, 2016
By Mandy Bell, GoPSUsports.com Student Staff Writer
UNIVERSITY PARK Pa. ââ'¬" A little girl anxiously waits for her dad to finish signing her up for gymnastics lessons. She sees a foam pit and desperately wants to jump in. She tried to wait for her dad to finish, but she could resist no longer.
Six-year-old Kiera Brown took off for the foam pit and fearlessly jumped in as her dad watched from afar. It was then that Brown and her family knew she was destined to be a gymnast.
With her mom being a former gymnast, gymnastics was in Brown's blood. Aside from her mom, Brown looked up to 10-year member of the United States' national gymnastics team, Dominique Dawes.
"I got to meet [Dawes] at one of my club meets. She signed my first cell phone and I still have it today," Brown said. "She was definitely one of my role models growing up."
From a young age, Brown loved performing floor routines. The floor exercise was the apparatus that she excelled at most, until her sophomore year of high school.
While performing on the floor, Brown ruptured her Achilles tendon. With the support of her family and teammates, she was able to return to gymnastics, but not before tearing her other Achilles tendon two years later.
"That's where most people would say I've had enough of gymnastics," Penn State head coach Jeff Thompson said. "The fact that she came back and she's now competing in her third year of college is a testament to her strength and courage."
While battling injury, Brown needed a way to continue practicing gymnastics without always having to be on her feet. That is when she turned to the uneven bars.
"After I tore my Achilles, the bars were the only thing I could do," Brown said. "So it then became my favorite event because I got good at it."
Brown took her talent on the bars to the University of Georgia to start her collegiate career. As a Gym Dog, Brown was named All-SEC in 2014 after tying for second on the uneven bars at the SEC Championship and finished the 2014 season as tied for 19th in the nation on the uneven bars.
After two seasons at the University of Georgia, Brown decided to make a change. She looked at multiple schools in the SEC and had dreamed of going to school in Florida since she was a little girl, but once she visited Penn State, there was no going back.
"Right when I came on the visit it was just like 'yeah this was it'," Brown said. "The campus was beautiful. I loved Rachelle [Thompson] and Jeff [Thompson] and the way they talked about the girls, I knew this was the team I wanted to be apart of."
Coach Thompson knew that Brown's personality and experience would fit in well on his young team. Making a name for herself on the bars in high school and college, Brown knew there were high expectations of her coming to this Penn State team. However, Coach Thompson had even more.
"We told her when she transferred here that we saw her as an all-arounder. She never competed as an all around gymnast at Georgia," Thompson said. "But she's known since day one that those were our expectations of her.
In her first meet as a Nittany Lion this past weekend, Brown led Penn State in the all-around category with a score of 38.950 tying for second overall. Brown scored a 9.60 on the vault, 9.70 on the floor, 9.80 on the balance beam and a stellar 9.95 on the uneven bars.
"I think for her to go 9.95 on bars in the first meet of the year is a testament to her," Thompson said. "We knew she was one of the best bar workers in the country, but this basically tells everybody that it doesn't matter if she's in a red leotard or blue leotard the judges recognize that routine as being outstanding."
The Nittany Lions host Nebraska on Saturday at 4 p.m. during the annual "Flip For The Cure" meet in Rec Hall.