Feb. 24, 2016
By Mandy Bell, GoPSUSports.com Student Staff Writer
UNIVERSITY PARK ââ'¬" On Saturday, the Nittany Lions gained another gymnast in the vaulting lineup, Chanen Raygoza. Only competing on vault once since her junior year in high school, Raygoza was ready to get back into the event's lineup.
"Well anytime you recruit someone for a certain role and it takes this long for them to fill that role, it's a great benefit for the team that she is finally able to do one of the events that was maybe the best thing that she did in high school," Penn State head coach Jeff Thompson said. "She had an amazing vault."
In Raygoza's junior year of high school, she experienced pain in her ankle that turned out to be bone spurs. She had to have surgery to have them removed, but they came back again during her senior year. She then had to have yet another surgery to clean everything up.
Raygoza has been injury-prone for as long as she can remember. With gymnasts, injuries are extremely common, but for Raygoza, all of her injuries happened to the lower half of her body. Because of this, she turned to the uneven bars to keep the pressure off of her bottom half.
"I have always loved bars and it is still my favorite event. I got hurt a lot when I was young with a lot of ankle things and lower body issues," Raygoza said. "I was always the one doing bars for hours and hours in the gym. I just got to do it a lot, got better and better at it and it became the one I liked the most."
Some would think that the dismount from the bars would impact the ankle the same way that landing vault does, but it does not.
"For me, it's all about angles that I land. When I land bars, it's more of like straight down, ankles 90 degrees at the most," Raygoza said. "Whereas with vault, you have to kind of come in at an angle and your ankles bend a lot more with that. My ankle doesn't really bend much more than 90 degrees so it makes it kind of hard."
The surface of the landing mat in vault is something that plays a factor to an injured ankle as well as the angle in which a gymnast must stick her landing.
"There's a big step from our training environment where the landing is a little bit softer. It's in the ground, so the top of it is level with the floor and you put your landing mats on top of it," Thompson said. "It's a little more forgiving if you land short, you don't crunch your ankles as bad. Going from the softer landing to a competition landing where it's just a mat on top of a basketball court, it's a more sudden stop."
The California native was originally going to take her talents to University of Georgia, but decided to commit to Penn State during junior year of high school because she loved Penn State's coaches and the team felt like a big family. However, deciding to come to the Northeast meant dealing with the winter for her first time.
"Last year was really hard for me," Raygoza said. "I wore a lot of layers and I carried around a corn bag. I would heat it up in the microwave and it was just like a big bag of hot. This year has been better and it's been a lot warmer."
Other than the weather, Raygoza has had no issues with going to a school 2,500 miles away from her hometown in Upland, California.
"There are kids that want to stay close to home and there are kids who don't care where they go as long as they get a great experience. When she came here, she fell in love with it," Thompson said. "You can tell if they come here and they are sitting on that couch and they got that look in their eye, this is the right place for them. Then you don't have any concerns no matter how far they are from home."
Raygoza posted a 9.750 and a 9.800 in her first two times back on vault. On Monday, she helped Penn State defeat Maryland by putting up a 9.825 on bars and a 9.800 on beam.
"We knew that it would take her a little bit of time to get her back to the way she was," Thompson said. "When you have the opportunity to get such a high-level student athlete, not someone that just excels in their sport, but also in the classroom, having to wait a little while for them to contribute fully is worth the wait."