Boise State gymnast Amy Glass' toughness an inspiration to team | Boise State Sports | Idaho Statesman
The tribute remains painted on the wall of the Boise State gymnastics team’s training gym.
“What would Amy do?”
Those words inspired the Broncos in 2009, when Amy Glass broke her neck on a fall from the bars and spent the rest of the season at home in California.
This is the woman who teammates call a “robot” and an “animal” to describe her work ethic. Her nickname: Bionic.
This is the woman who, two weeks after she left the hospital, spent 30-minute bursts on an elliptical machine — with a bulky, protective halo on her head.
This is the woman who stared down the veteran sports surgeon and doting father who suggested that she give up the sport, giving her answer with her eyes rather than words.
Teammates admire her.
So does her dad.
“She is so determined, so driven,” Dennis Glass said. “If there’s ever a person I can take lessons from, it’s Amy. … She’s got a fire in her belly that she can’t put out.”
Glass, now a redshirt junior, returned to the Broncos for the 2010 season. This year, she ranks No. 12 in the nation in the all-around and was named the WAC Gymnast of the Year.
And on Saturday, she will lead the No. 13 Broncos into the NCAA North Central Region meet in Denver, where they have the best opportunity in school history to reach their first NCAA Gymnastics Championships.
The Broncos wouldn’t be in this position without Glass’ scores and leadership.
“Who doesn’t want to be like that?” coach Neil Resnick said. “Who doesn’t want to be that committed, that focused, that disciplined, that hard a worker, that unflappable? There’s different kinds of leaders. There’s the rah-rah guys. Then there’s the people where you go, ‘Wow, how does she do that — every day, all the time?’ ”
Glass credits her parents — Dennis, a former officer with the California Highway Patrol, and Shari, a substitute teacher.
“I think it’s just the way my parents raised me,” she said. “I see a lot of myself in my dad — sometimes fortunately, sometimes unfortunately. … We’re stubborn and hard-headed to the max.
“I walk across campus and people say, ‘Are you OK? What’s wrong with you?’ I just have a natural scowl. I don’t have that pretty, happy look. I’m just focused.”
Glass’ parents shared her commitment to gymnastics. She started the sport when she was 4, when she enjoyed the tumbling her tap dancing class did for fun more than the skill she was there to learn.
She started in a recreation program but eventually joined a club that was a half-hour drive from the family’s Vacaville, Calif., home.
Her parents drove her there five days a week, spent up to 5 hours hanging out while she practiced, and drove her home. Glass did her homework in the car.
“We made it a family affair,” Dennis said.
Glass attracted recruiting interest from across the West but chose Boise State, in part, because she knew Resnick, a former club coach.
Her career got off to a promising start — she was an all-arounder as a freshman in 2008 — but a freak accident nearly ended it.
The Broncos were warming up on the uneven bars at San Jose State for the second meet of the 2009 season. Glass was the first Bronco to mount the bars. Her parents, who attend nearly every meet, weren’t in the arena yet.
“I had too much energy and slipped off the bar and fell,” Glass said.
Resnick called the fall maybe the lowest moment of his career.
“It was on something very basic and simple,” he said. “My eyes almost did a double-take — ‘That didn’t just happen.’ I was shocked.”
Glass landed on the top of her head and her knees — falling from 15 feet. Her first complaint was that one of her knees hurt.
She got up and walked around. A doctor put a neck brace on her, which was what her parents noticed when they arrived.
“You’re around this so much that it’s just part of the game,” Dennis said. “But I guess the frightful thing is the end result of it, of where it could have really ended up.”
Glass broke the C5 vertebra and knocked her C5 and C6 vertebrae out of alignment. The surgeon inserted a plate and four screws to repair the damage and attached the halo to help her heal.
Doctors initially were vague about her gymnastics future. “That was the only time I saw her cry,” Resnick said.
A couple days later, the surgeon and Dennis made their pitch to Glass that maybe she should retire.
“As soon as I said that,” Dennis said, “not that it was the wrong thing to say, she looked at me and I knew right away that that’s not the way it was going to be.”
Said Glass: “That’s when I made up my mind that I was going to come back, when they told me I shouldn’t.”
She withdrew from classes for that semester to recover at home, eschewing pain medication and pushing doctors’ restrictions to the limits. Teammates donned T-shirts with the “What would Amy do?” motto.
“It really brought us together in the gym,” said senior standout Hannah Redmon, who was in Glass’ recruiting class. “We were competing for Amy that year. … That was something to help us push ourselves. We knew Amy would get through anything, because that’s just how she is.”
By summer, doctors cleared Glass to return to the gym — and Resnick offered her a student coaching position if she wasn’t up for it.
“They really looked to find things wrong,” Dennis said of the doctors who cleared her, “but they couldn’t find anything.”
The first three months of her comeback were nothing but gymnastics basics. It was almost Halloween before she was fully cleared — just two months before the season began.
“That’s part of why she’s better now,” Resnick said. “If I had to pick one thing that was weak in her gymnastics, it was her foundation-level skills. Because she had to come back from square one, she fixed a lot of those things.”
Glass won the bars title in the 2010 season opener — a little personal revenge — and was named the West Region Athlete of the Year.
And she truly blossomed this year — after an offseason of grinding workouts even by her standards. She has established new career highs in everything but vault. And she has scored at least 9.8 on 82 percent of her routines.
“She just works like you wouldn’t believe,” Redmon said. “It’s crazy. We say, ‘We’re so sore. How are you practicing today?’ She’s so strong mentally and physically.
“… Amy never shows nerves — if she has them, we’ll never know.”
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