In the first months of 2020, a 20-year-old Dutch elite gymnast was on a soul-searching gap year, wondering what to do next in life. A European finalist and world championship competitor, she didn’t want to quit the sport, but a propensity for lower body injuries made it difficult for her to continue training elite.
As the NCAA looked like an appealing yet distant option, little did she know that two years later she would make history for a new gymnastics program, becoming its first ever regional qualifier, first All-American and first to score a perfect 10.0 on bars, her pet event.
For Mara Titarsolej, everything changed when Long Island University announced the addition of a women’s gymnastics program in May 2020.
Up until that point, she had reached out to some NCAA coaches but had made little progress. “College gymnastics was really interesting to me. I watched a lot of meets and I was like, ‘Oh, that looks fun, let’s try and reach out to some schools,’” Titarsolej said. “So I did, and I got in contact with a couple and the COVID year happened, so a lot of them had to cut down on budget and could not afford a spot anymore. Then I saw on the Instagram page that LIU was adding gymnastics, so I started to reach out there—it was my last resort for college gymnastics.”
Titarsolej’s email reached LIU’s head coach Randy Lane, who had recently been appointed to the job after spending the last seven seasons at UCLA. Lane was overwhelmed with requests at the time, as over 90 gymnasts reached out to him hoping to be a member of LIU’s inaugural team.
When he saw Titarsolej’s email and resume, however, he knew he had found someone special. Plus, she was not the first Dutch gymnast he had ever coached. “Lichelle Wong is a Dutch gymnast who I recruited a long time ago for Michigan State when I was coaching there; then she ended up going to UCLA,” Lane explained. “So when Mara reached out, I reached out to Lichelle right away, and I asked if she knew her. It was good to have a connection, knowing somebody from the country. It’s interesting to have now one of the few Dutch women who have come to the States to do college gymnastics.”
The transition from elite to college gymnastics was not a smooth one for Titarsolej. Since she was recruited late and in the midst of the pandemic, she started her competitive season late, as she was initially ineligible. When she did finally take the competition floor, she immediately produced some stellar performances on bars, scoring as high as a 9.925. After only three meets, however, she was injured and was forced to sit out the rest of the season.
This year, she again started off her season slow but then found her rhythm and confidence, producing near-perfect routines every week—a feat she hopes to replicate this weekend in a bid to become the first LIU gymnast to qualify to the national championships.
What’s changed this year? For Titarsolej, the most remarkable difference is her trust in her team. “We’ve really come together as a team—we trust each other better now, so we’re more ourselves and we’re more comfortable. And that shows also in competition—we’re doing so much better this year compared to last year,” she said. “Last year, we had to get used to the whole environment of college and that also really helps having more experience with how everything works.”
Her relationship with her head coach has also evolved as they got to know each other better. For Lane, it became important to build Titarsolej’s confidence and to reassure her perfectionist side that she was good enough. “Her confidence was lacking when she got here, and I can see we’re chipping away, making her believe each day that she’s this good,” he said. “She is a perfectionist, but not a perfectionist where she has to be perfect all the time. That’s one of the things I really wanted her to let go of—it’s just go up there and do her best; her best is good enough typically. I think when she let go of the having to be perfect, it allowed her to enjoy each routine.”
Lane’s playful side—he often jokes with Titarsolej that “that routine was only a 9.900, oops”—is well received by his athlete. “I’m really harsh on myself, so having a coach pushing me even more can bring me down,” she said. “So I think it really works for me that he’s like, ‘OK, you’ve got this, just do your normal thing, sometimes doing your normal thing is good enough.’ Because when this little thing is a little bit off, I can be really hard on myself and get down really fast if things don’t work for me as I want them to.”
After the second meet of the season this year, Titarsolej sat down with her coaches and discussed the reasons why she was not performing at her best on bars. “She really took that initiative, knowing that quicker handstands were important, cleaning up her back swing in her Maloney, doing everything she could to just get a little bit better,” Lane explained. “Doing it on a daily basis and getting a little bit better each day has given her the confidence to know that when she raises her hand in competition, she can do exactly what she does in practice every day. She’s grown immensely as a competitor, who’s starting to build that confidence herself.”
After all the hard work, the focus on the details and seven out of eight straight routines scoring a 9.900 or better, Titarsolej was finally awarded LIU’s first perfect 10.0 on March 6 in a home meet against North Carolina.
Curiously, bars was not her best event when she was growing up. “Actually, I was really bad at it when I was like 11 years old, I would always get sevens out of 10. Then I got a lot of injuries on my lower body— ankles and knees and everything when I started to grow—so I spent a lot of time on bars,” Titarsolej said. “My coach from back home, he always spotted me with everything, so I practiced a lot of different skills. I think that shows, too, because I have a lot of skills I can choose from, and I got a 10.0 on bars, which makes me more comfortable and confident on that event.”
The day Titarsolej scored her 10.0 on bars, magic was in the air in the arena, as it was alumni night at LIU. Given that the Sharks are a very young program and still don’t have any alumnae, Lane invited former gymnasts from the teams he previously coached. One of them was Megan Fenton, the first UCLA gymnast to ever score a perfect 10.0 on bars in 1993. “She was there at the meet, so I said that was Mara’s good luck charm, that Megan Fenton was there,” Lane said.
When Titarsolej stuck her dismount, she could sense that that routine could be the one. “I kind of could feel it, especially because of the team. Everyone was so overly happy and excited. The whole tension in the air was saying, ‘This could be it,’” she recalled. “I didn’t think I was going to get a 10.0. I thought I was going to get a 10.0 from one judge and then the other would give me a 9.950. When they both flashed the 10.0s, I didn’t even see both 10.0s, but my team was so crazy and happy, that I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s really happening.’”
Tears of joy spilled not only from Titarsolej’s eyes, but also from her head coach’s. “I’ve had the fortune to coach a lot of perfect 10.0s, and every single one of them chokes me up. Just because it’s the blood, sweat and tears that everyone had to endure to get to that point,” Lane explained. “[When] the first 10.0 went up from the head judge and then the second went up, I got emotional. I had to back away for a minute. But that wouldn’t make me human if I didn’t have any emotions and feelings about what has just happened. I’m glad I have that feeling and emotion when that happened to a hard-working young woman who deserves everything that she’s got.”
While Titarsolej and Lane are still processing the magnitude of having produced a perfect 10.0 in only the second year of the program, they already know that it’s put LIU on the gymnastics map. “I was hanging out in the director’s office right after practice today and a professor came in and said, ‘Is that Mara girl going all the way? Because I didn’t get to see the 10.0, but everybody’s talking about it,’” Lane said. “I think for a young program like ours, to achieve that in the second year when there’s still so many programs who haven’t achieved that and had that fortune, I feel really great with the direction of LIU gymnastics and the program in general.”
The perfect score also motivates the whole team to work even harder in the gym and set even higher goals for themselves for the next season. “I’m very big on setting goals. You have to set goals that are high enough but attainable, but if you don’t set your goals high enough, what are you reaching for? Lowballing yourself and saying, ‘Oh I can score a 9.600, that’s not going to do it,’” Lane said. “Everybody has the opportunity to score a 10.0 in the NCAA and I think that the beauty of this young program is that they’re starting to understand that it’s not just Mara who can do this—they have the ability, too.”
As they are starting to think about next season’s goals, Titarsolej would love to compete at regionals with her team. As for herself, she hopes she will be able to compete on beam and floor as well, after some broken toes limited her to bars this year. She also wants to upgrade her bar routine. “I never want to hold her back from being her best,” Lane said. “I’m already thinking of what her routine is going to be like next year, as we’ve been talking about adding the Jaeger back in and hopefully doing a full-out dismount. But it’s going to come step by step. Let’s continue with this year’s journey first and then we’ll focus on next year.”
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Article by Talitha Ilacqua; photo courtesy of LIU Athletics
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