PROVO, Utah – Mary Fredericks, a long-time club coach and alternate to the 1996 U.S. Olympic team, joined the BYU gymnastics staff this season as a volunteer assistant coach.
Mary Beth Arnold, now Mary Fredericks, started in gymnastics at the age of 3. She proceeded to make history as the youngest gymnast to ever make the national team when she was only 10 years old. Fredericks was then a member of the 1995 bronze medal world team and the 1995 gold medal Pan-American team. Ultimately, she was an alternate to the 1996 Olympic team.
Coming home, Fredericks said she was recruited by all kinds of colleges, but college gymnastics wasn’t exactly her cup of tea.
“When you’re an elite it’s very serious, and I’m not a fun athlete,” she said. “But coaching is great because I can have so much more fun as a coach.”
Fredericks has been at BYU since 2004. She worked as a massage therapist for seven years before becoming a strength and flexibility assistant coach for the men’s track team and then men’s volleyball. Fredericks volunteered for a year with the diving team, then came back to club gymnastics coaching. Now she’s looking to get back into college coaching.
As Fredericks applied for college coaching positions, BYU head coach Guard Young called and asked for her help with the large BYU team. She agreed to the task.
“It’s been fun to get back in the gym and coach,” Fredericks reflected. “I’m most excited about trying to help these girls improve and move up the ranks. They’re very capable of being a higher-ranked team.”
The switch from coaching club to college will allow Fredericks to continue pursuing her ultimate goal of coaching side-by-side with her husband as head coaches in the collegiate level.
“Once these girls make it to college, they know it’s worth it,” Fredericks commented on the difference between coaching college instead of club. “They’ve put in the sacrifice. They’re already there and devoted. We just polish and put finishing touches on their gymnastics.”
Fredericks and her husband, Jason, live here in Utah with their five kids. All five of their children participate in swimming or diving and hope to compete at the collegiate level. Jason was a regional vault champion before a massive ankle break that led to snowboarding. However, his mom coached men’s club gymnastics, which kept him involved in the sport.
Most notably, Fredericks and her husband created the Road to Nationals site, the main source of statistical and rankings information for college gymnastics. The site started when Fredericks coached college gymnastics in Missouri. At the time, results were not posted until Sunday nights and individual coaches used Excel spreadsheets to determine rankings.
Jason manages the programming side while Fredericks takes care of the aesthetics. She decides on the look and function of the site.
The ultimate goal is to create a useful database for coaches and fans. Road to Nationals provides apps and graphs to see exact rankings, including “what if” calculators and identifying most valuable players for the teams.
“We want it to be easy to function, and we want coaches to be able to build their best team,” Fredericks said. “Fantasy gymnastics uses our site a lot for players to pick their teams, and we want to make that bigger.”
One of the main priorities for Fredericks is to continue to promote the sport of gymnastics through the site as well as through coaching opportunities.
“This sport is the No. 3 most-watched in the world and No. 1 in the summer games, but colleges don’t pull in fans,” Fredericks explained. “We wanted to create this fan-friendly site that people can have fun on and follow their teams’ rankings, hopefully leading them to then go to meets.”
Check out the 2018 season schedule to see the BYU gymnasts show off what Fredericks and the other coaches teach them. You can also view Fredericks competing at the 1996 Olympic Trials on YouTube.