Ashleigh Gnat has had a long and illustrious gymnastics career, but this spring she takes on a new challenge.
With 17 All-American honors, 62 event titles, nine perfect 10s, a Corbett Award and an AAI Award, Gnat is no stranger to challenges, but her new role as a student assistant coach presents a different one.
“It’s definitely been a very different, a very new experience for me,” Gnat said. “I’m thankful that our coaches give me a lot of freedom to learn and to try new things. They give me a lot of responsibility which I didn’t expect at all. They’ve been so helpful in the teaching experience.”
The biggest challenge, Gnat explained, is the weird “in between” position she’s taken on having to coach women she previously competed with.
Though treading that line is tough, the team is receptive to the way Gnat coaches and communicates with them.
“There’s a whole lot of ‘been there, done that’ and she knows the psychology, the mentality, that it takes,” LSU coach D-D Breaux said. “The kids really respond to her. It really has given us a lot of flexibility in how we train.”
Coaching gymnastics is different than so many other sports because it does not rely on any physical demonstrations. Gnat described gymnastics as a sport that relies on how the athlete feels her body and correcting those specific spots.
While Gnat won’t be on a balance beam any time soon, she has no trouble communicating her thoughts to the gymnasts.
“You don’t necessarily have to do the skill, you just have to communicate the direction that you want them to go in,” Gnat said. “They’re so receptive — they’re so talented that they really don’t need a lot.”
Gnat comes from a gymnastics family, so her natural ability to coach and compete was no surprise.
Her mother Joan Gnat was a member of the 1972 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team in Munich, while her father Ray was an All-American at LSU. Her sister Jeana Rice-Helms was an All-American at Alabama.
By the time Ashleigh was a toddler, her parents Ray and Joan founded ACE Gymnastics, where she competed as a level 10 gymnast.
“They really cultivated a relationship where I loved the sport and they made sure that I continue loving it,” Ashleigh said. “I think that’s something I have to thank them for because they’re the whole reason I love the sport the way that I do. They’re still helping me now with coaching stuff.”
In every youth sport, there are always obsessive, helicopter parents that try to live vicariously through their children, especially when the parents double as coaches.
Ray and Joan were nothing like that. While coming from a family of accomplished gymnasts can be a lot of pressure, neither Ashleigh nor her sister were ever forced to participate.
“They actually asked me if I wanted to quit all the time because they didn’t want to be those forceful parents,” Ashleigh said. “If I had a bad day or I was upset they would be like, ‘well you can always quit.’ I would get really mad like, ‘I’m never going to quit, I can’t believe you would even suggest that.’”
Ashleigh’s parents always instilled in her a love of gymnastics, and LSU coach Jay Clark even said Ashleigh coaches more like her parents than the LSU coaching staff because of her years being trained by them.
For so many years, Ashleigh wanted to be a club gymnastics coach like her parents until she came to Baton Rouge to compete for Breaux and fell in love with the environment at LSU.
“As soon as I got introduced to college gymnastics, I fell in love with the team aspect of it,” Ashleigh said. “Once I became part of that, I realized that it’s just a completely different experience, being able to have that type of family environment and I knew that was something that I wanted to continue to be part of.”