Hampton grad Rachel Hornung recovers from knee injury, finds routine with WVU gymnastics

Things finally are getting back to normal for Hampton graduate Rachel Hornung.

Normal means doing aerial cartwheels on a 4-inch wide balance beam and performing midair straddles and flips on uneven bars 8 feet off the ground.

A junior on the West Virginia women’s gymnastics team, Hornung is returning to her routine after a torn ACL cut into most of her sophomore season and the pandemic changed just about everything else.

“I’m fully back now,” she said. “I’ve been able to come back and do everything I needed to compete.”

The 5-foot-4 Hornung, who is doing primarily bars and beam for the Mountaineers (0-6, 0-6 Big 12), placed second in the all-around at Iowa State on March 1 and sixth at No. 9 Denver on Feb. 21.

Hornung will have a homecoming as the Mountaineers were scheduled to face Pitt three times in a 10-day span (at Pitt on March 5 and 12 and hosting the Panthers on Sunday) prior to welcoming the Big 12 gymnastics championships to Morgantown on March 20.

“I’m super excited that the Big 12 is being held at WVU,” Hornung said. “Coming to Pitt also feels like a home meet. It should be a good end to the season.”

The same could not be said of her freshman season at West Virginia.

In the final meet, Hornung tore her right ACL doing the vault at the NCAA Regional Championship on April 5, 2019, in Ann Arbor, Mich. But she dug into her rehabilitation and returned to the mat about 10 months after surgery. She made her sophomore debut Feb. 21, 2020, against Pitt and appeared in five matches during the covid-shortened season.

“I definitely pushed myself to be able to get back as fast as I could,” she said. “I kept pushing to make it sooner, but (the medical staff) kept telling me I had to relax a little bit.”

WVU gymnastics coach Jason Butts wasn’t surprised by Hornung’s determination to return.

“Coming back from her rehab, she was just on a mission,” he said. “It was day in and day out. She wanted to get back as fast as possible, and it has continued all the way through covid and over the summer and into the fall.”

Hornung, who competed for Hampton varsity for 1½ years, said she started gymnastics at 18 months old and began competing in the sport in first grade. This past summer was the first one since then that Hornung was unable to work on gymnastics. With facilities closed because of covid-19, she just tried to stay in shape.

“I was able to work out a little bit, but it wasn’t the same,” she said. “It was definitely hard coming back to gymnastics because I hadn’t been doing it for so long. It was difficult.”

For years, Hornung made it look easy. As a freshman at Hampton, she won the Advanced Division all-around individual gold at the 2015 WPIAL gymnastics championship, leading the Talbots to their first team title.

She left the high school team midway through her sophomore season to focus on club gymnastics with the Pittsburgh North Stars out of Jewart’s Gymnastics in Hampton. She became a two-time Junior Olympic national championship qualifier, placing 10th on the vault in 2017 and sixth on beam and ninth in all-around in ’18, and earned a Division I scholarship to West Virginia.

As a freshman with the Mountaineers, she competed in all 14 meets and finished fourth on the team with 388.6 points before the final-meet torn ACL.

“Rachel is a very determined and dedicated gymnast,” Butts said. “And not just gymnast. Really anything she sets her mind to in life, she is going to accomplish it.”

Hornung said she felt jitters when she returned to competition one year ago after her knee surgery. It was on the balance beam, her favorite event, but one that can be stressful to even established gymnasts.

“I was definitely nervous,” she said. “Normally, beam is a nerve-wracking event already because, I mean, you are on four inches. So I had the nerves, and then of course the girl in front of me kept falling. That added a little bit more pressure. It was definitely hard on the mental side of it.

“But I ended up doing fine.”