Today, when she takes you step by step what happened that day when Kayla Nowak took a tkachev just a little bit too early, it is almost impossible to tell how much that one fall would impact not only her gymnastics, but also her life.

            Nowak recalls not really knowing what was going on in those moments after her fall, just knowing that she hurt all over. Then the team trainer took her to get an x-ray.

“A couple of the trainers gathered around the little [x-ray] machine, and I was just still laying there. I knew something wasn’t right just because of all the whispering and everything.”

Nowak had a compression fracture at T12 on her spine.

“I didn’t really know what that meant, or the extent of it and everything.”

Trainers made the decision to take Nowak up to Oklahoma City, where OU’s spine specialist was to get a better look. She was given three different scans, all of which she says she was miserable in, and then taken straight to surgery.

“The doctor had actually told me that they might wake me up in the middle of surgery and ask me to do a command, you know, move your finger, bend your wrist, something. And then put me back to sleep…so I was freaking out mostly about that the entire time.”

Luckily, she didn’t have to do that. And she woke up right after surgery, and scratched her eye. Something so small that meant so much, because it meant she was not paralyzed.

            Although her injury was only about a week before Christmas break, Nowak was able to fly to Illinois to be with her family for break. But could she fly with her team to Georgia?

            “Once I got the clearance to go home…I was like, okay, well maybe if they’ll let me go home, I was like, I have to go to this meet. You don’t understand…whether I was competing or not, I had to be there.”

            Being at that Georgia meet with her team was Nowak’s first step in assuming a new role for her senior season. She may not be able to compete, but she was always on the floor doing what she could, including being designated by head coach, K.J. Kindler as the “spray girl” for bars.

            “I could barely watch the first meet. I was a nervous wreck…even when I was competing I could barely watch anyone that was competing before me. So for me to have to sit down and watch a whole meet, was just like, oh my gosh.”

            “The whole spraying thing, once I could move I was like, I need something to do. At least for one event, I need to be doing something. So I think K.J. gave me that job just to kind of occupy me and make me happy.”

            Only Nowak can tell you why she feels so compelled to continue to be there through everything with her team and support them and push them to what she knows they can do.

            “I love these guys. I’m just so…the relationships we’ve built and everything. Like, they all treat me exactly the same, even though I’m not able to compete and workout with them and have to go through that part of it with them. Everything else I’m totally a part of and I want to be a part of because I’m not going to get to do this for the rest of my life.”

            Nowak says she used to think she may have been a little over the top, and a loud mouth when it came to cheering at meets, but she definitely wouldn’t change that. During NCAA Championships, where her team placed 2nd,  Nowak was right next to them in the corral, cheering at the top of her lungs.