FAYETTEVILLE — Barnhill Arena doesn’t exactly bring back fond memories for Valorie Kondos-Field.
Kondos-Field, who has led UCLA’s gymnastics team to six national championships, brought her team to Barnhill Arena for the NCAA regionals in 2006, but the Bruins were upset by littleknown and less-respected Arkansas. The Bruins had advanced to the NCAA Championships every year since 1992 before the upset.
UCLA returns to Arkansas for the first time since 2006 for the six-team NCAA South Central Regional meet, which begins at 4 p.m. today. The top two finishers will advance to the NCAA Championships on April 20-22 in Duluth, Ga.
“We didn’t feel they should have been a threat, and they absolutely were,” Kondos-Field said. “I will never forget sobbing after that meet. It was just horrible to be on the receiving end of that. However, I did know very clearly it was one of the best things that could have happened for our sport.”
The upset was somewhat astonishing because Arkansas’ gymnastics program was in just its fourth year of existence, while UCLA had won four of the previous six national titles. The Arkansas coaches, Mark and Rene Cook, had thought it would take five years for the Razorbacks just to get to the level where they could be competitive against national power teams.
“We became competitive before we imagined we could,” said Mark Cook, an assistant to Kondos-Field on UCLA’s 1997 national championship team. “It is surreal sometimes that our peers look at our program as being an established team. I told the girls a long time ago that respect takes a long time to get.
“Now we have that respect we didn’t have the first five years. We weren’t an anomaly.”
Rene Cook said she felt Arkansas was still regarded as a flash in the pan for years after the knocking UCLA out of the NCAA Championships in 2006. She didn’t think her team earned respect as a legitimate major program until this year, when Arkansas surged into a tie for first in the national rankings — with UCLA, of all teams.
Even a fifth-place finish at nationals in 2009 didn’t convince everyone. The Razorbacks have advanced to the NCAA Championships — where only 12 teams qualify — five times since the program was started 10 years ago.
“I still felt like they felt that was a fluke,” Rene Cook said of the program’s Super Six appearance in 2009. “It was just that one time.”
Don’t count Kondos-Field among the doubters. She said the job the Cooks have done building a program from the ground up into a perennial top-10 caliber team almost defies description.
“It’s beyond remarkable,” Kondos-Field said. “To be able to achieve what they’ve achieved, it’s really unfathomable. I can’t begin to imagine what their days were like recruiting athletes to a program not in existence.”
It was tough going the first few years, trying to bring in talented athletes to a start-up program in a state that wasn’t known for its gymnastics tradition. Rene Cook said they also had to battle the stereotypes about Arkansas in general since most club and high school gymnastics programs had never competed in the state.
Arkansas assistant Samantha Cortez was a member of the Cooks’ third recruiting class, and she remembers what it was like when she was being recruited out of New Jersey by the Razorbacks.
“All my friends would tease me,” Cortez said. “Up there, we had no idea. I had no idea what Arkansas was like. I couldn’t even base an opinion.”
Cortez, and others like her who took a chance to pioneer a program, helped Arkansas reach the heights it has so far. The Razorbacks have fallen this year from No. 1 to No. 10 in the national rankings as injuries have hampered standouts Katherine Grable, Jordan Salsberg and Kelci Lewis.
Rene Cook said it’s a measure of how good Arkansas has become that even during an injury-rattled season, the Razorbacks are still the 10thranked team in the nation. If Grable and Lewis are close to full health at today’s meet, chances are good the Razorbacks will be moving on to the NCAA Championships for a fifth consecutive year.
“The 10 years have gone by pretty fast, but we continue to push the envelope to try to go further,” Mark Cook said. “Now we’re just pushing, not to get on top, but to be consistent at the top.
“It’s like climbing a mountain. The higher you get, the harder it gets.”
Sports, Pages 20 on 04/07/2012