As LSU junior Kayli Alphonso stood on the first-place podium at the International Powerlifting Federation’s World Juniors Women’s Championships with the American flag draped around her and the national anthem playing, she felt like she was on top of the world.
But powerlifting wasn’t her first calling. The 114-pound Alphonso thought she fit in better in cheerleading, but she felt there was something missing. As a sophomore in high school, Alphonso tried out for the powerlifting team and never looked back.
“You can’t really grow in cheerleading,” Alphonso said. “So I went to [powerlifting] tryouts and I fell in love with it. It’s not like a sport where you have to rely on everyone else so heavily. It’s all on me and I love that.”
As a beginner to the sport, Alphonso showed potential in the gym, but had a hard time showing it in competitions.
“I immediately knew she was going to be special at the conclusion of her first year,” said former Northshore High School powerlifting coach Christian Monson. “Kayli had a drive that I had never seen in any athlete that I coached. She should have walked away with a state championship her junior year, but she was disqualified from the state meet because the pressure she put on herself didn’t allow her to perform basic movements.”
Alphonso had a self-diagnosed case of performance anxiety and it put a damper on her ability to compete in the sport she had become so passionate about.
“I think I realized I am too talented to let this bring me down,” Alphonso said. “During my senior year, I did research on performance anxiety, and learning about my condition helped me control it.”
After getting a grasp on the sport, Alphonso won the 2012 Louisiana State Powerlifting Championship while helping Northshore High School finish in first place.
“Every lift that she made caused her confidence to swell,” Monson said. “Then the meets became fun versus the thought of waiting for something bad to happen.”
Alphonso said the feeling of winning the state title was an incentive to continue lifting in college. Her talent, combined with the LSU powerlifting club’s record of winning a national title in six of the last seven years, became a force to be reckoned with.
In her first year at LSU, Alphonso won the 2013 Collegiate National Powerlifting Championship and was named to the USA Powerlifting alternate team. Her next goal was to be picked for the team.
While trying to defend her title, Alphonso ended up finishing second at nationals in her sophomore season and once again missed out on being named to the USA Powerlifting team, as she was named an alternate.
“There was a lot of pressure because I was a team officer and I had to split the roles of my training and being a coach,” Alphonso said. “But [USA coach Curt St. Romain] said he would still pick me for the team if I could hit a certain number at Women’s Nationals.”
Alphonso said she had the best meet of her life at Women’s Nationals in Baton Rouge and surpassed the total Romain wanted her to lift.
“[Romain] came up to me and said, ‘pack your bags, you’re going to Hungary,’” Alphonso said.
Stress from the 20-hour trip to Orosháza, Hungary, put Alphonso at a disadvantage before the meet started: she lost two pounds and weighed in less than all other competitors in the 115-pound weight class.
Alphonso started out by completing just one of three attempts in both squat and bench press, putting her 61 pounds behind the first place Natalia Melnikova of Russia and 33 pounds behind the second place Mareen Wendlandt of Germany.
Romain said he planned on working to pick off lifters with each attempt in the deadlift; after Wendlandt’s difficult opener and Melnikova’s failed second attempt, he knew Alphonso would win on her third lift.
Alphonso needed 358 pounds on her last lift, more than she had ever lifted before.
But she said she wasn’t leaving Hungary without winning the World Championship.
“I didn’t even know how much was on the bar,” Alphonso said. “But when I lifted it, I immediately knew I had just won the world championship.”
Despite being the reigning IPF world champion, Alphonso insists she doesn’t feel any different. She said she is nothing more than a normal college student whose budding passion turned into the experience of a lifetime.
Alphonso acknowledges that it is a great accomplishment, but she doesn’t do it for the glory; she lifts because it is her passion.
Alphonso was invited to compete in next year’s World Championships in Prague, Czech Republic, but she’s not set on competing due to injury concerns.
“It starts to take a toll after putting years of wear and tear on your body,” Alphonso said. “I have a compressed disc in my L5 vertebrae, and my shoulders and hips come out of place. But my window is closing; I only have two more years in my age group. We’ll see what happens.”