Gymnastics has been Laycee Andersen’s life, for basically her whole life.
The Clear Lake, South Dakotan is 17 and started when she was only 2 years old.
From floor to bars, she basically does every event she possibly can.
If you watch her today, you can tell she’s worked hard and is rightfully confident because of it. But there was a time where her confidence was shaken.
Dealing with setbacks
One day she was doing a move called kip cast hands. She explained that’s when one goes all the way up on the bar in a handstand.
“I bent my legs and swung down. I kind of just slipped, my hands fell off backwards and I landed straight on my arms and dislocated both of my elbows.”
She did physical therapy at the Sanford Clear Lake Clinic for 10 months.
The day that she was officially fully recovered from her elbow injury, she went to the gymnastics center.
“I was getting ready for my freshman high school season. I was over on the floor warming up. I did a round off back tuck, and it was a fluke thing, but my foot landed sideways, and I dislocated my left ankle,” she recalled.
After Laycee had both been patient and worked hard to return to form, this ankle injury had an impact on Laycee’s psyche.
There’s an obvious physical component to injury recovery, but the mental component can sometimes get overlooked.
Working with a sports psychologist
Laycee told her mother Stacy that she wanted to start working with a sports psychologist on the road to her recovery. It’s when she met Sioux Falls-based Sanford Health sports psychologist Josefine Combs, Psy.D.
“She (Laycee) decided that she was going to start seeing somebody; it was not us,” said Stacy. “I always encouraged her to do it on her own. I never went into the sessions with her. She did it on her own. My thought was it’s your process. You don’t need your mom sitting with you while you do it.”
With Dr. Combs, Laycee worked through her worries.
“It was this series of things – ‘what’s next? This is really getting to me.’ So, that’s kind of how she found me,” said Dr. Combs. “And we started working on confidence and kind of finding her way back to herself and working with expectation.”
Laycee said Dr. Combs taught her many things throughout their time together. One of them being the power of the word “yet.”
“I’m very much a person who says, ‘I can’t do this right now.’ She taught me to put ‘yet’ at the end of it. I can’t do this yet. It’s so little, but it truly helps a lot. I still use it today,” said Laycee.
Dr. Combs also taught Laycee to “be where your feet are.”
“Right before I was about to compete or do a new skill, I was always thinking to myself, what if I can’t do this today? So many things going on inside my brain and she told me to be where my feet are and just take a minute and look down where I am, and what I can feel here,” said Laycee.
Dr. Combs said Laycee was a joy to work with.
“Anything I ever gave her she took in strides, went and implemented it, did her homework and then came back and reported how it went, and we talked about how we could tweak things further,” said Dr. Combs.
Prioritizing mental health
She added that sports are a great thing. They can also bring on certain amounts of pressure, which can be hard to mentally manage. The sports environment is always bigger, greater, faster, stronger. It’s a lot to place on any athlete, especially ones who are younger.
“Especially in sports that are highly evaluative, right? Gymnastics, figure skating, diving – there’s these excruciating point deductions and everything, your physique, your looks, everything matters. It’s incredibly scrutinizing and stressful,” said Dr. Combs.
“I think recognizing that pressure and also learning that it’s normal to feel that, and there are tools that can help deal with those kinds of things, is extremely helpful.”
Multiple high-profile athletes, like Simone Biles, Michael Phelps and Kevin Love to name a few, have come out and talked about the challenges they’ve faced.
Dr. Combs said the more caring for athletes’ mental health is normalized, the better.
“Even the most decorated athletes have nerves. Even the most accomplished individuals can struggle. People mistake success for confidence, and confidence is not an indefinite source. We have to work, we have to renew, we have to make sure that’s a skill we can keep with us,” said Dr. Combs.
And Laycee said working with Dr. Combs helped strengthen her love for her sport.
“I love gymnastics more than I ever have before,” she said. “It’s so much more fun when you’re not worrying about everything and you have ways to prevent the negative thoughts from coming into your mind.”
Learn more
- NFL prospect overcomes mental health issues on path to pros
- Gymnast learns lessons working back from serious knee injury
- How Sanford supports athletes’ mental health
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Posted In Behavioral Health, Clear Lake, Orthopedics, Sports Medicine
