From Life in a Spiral to Home at Oregon State

It's February 17, 2018, and Destinee Davis is on the balance beam. She takes a deep breath, visualizing the acrobatic series she's about to perform. This is her first competitive beam routine in three weeks and Tanya Chaplin has her in the anchor spot. It's an amazing feeling to have that kind of trust from your head coach; Davis completes the routine and scores 9.90 to win the event.

It's hard to imagine that, not long ago, she was ready to quit the sport forever.

Davis was raised in an affluent family in Woodland, Washington. Her father owned a business. Her mother Terri was a stay-at-home mom. Some of the details are blurred in her memory, but Davis knows her world crashed down during the summer of 2012, before her freshman year of high school, when her father left the family.

"Suddenly, there was no one to take (her younger brother) Deven or me to school," Davis said. She and Deven transferred back from their school in Vancouver, population 176,000, to a closer one in Woodland, population 6,100.

"Woodland is a really small town," Davis said. "So when something happens ... people just know everything, or at least think they know everything, and stories get twisted."

School got difficult for the previously excellent student.

"Everything just blew up," she said. "Everyone is all up in your business. ... You show up to school and feel like, 'Hey, yeah. My family is literally falling apart and my life is hell right now. I'm just trying to make it through the day.' ... My mental health was remarkably awful. Today, it is incredibly better than it was, but it is definitely something I still struggle with sometimes."

She recalled that, with her dad no longer paying all the bills, school became an afterthought. The house went into foreclosure. Instead of grades and gymnastics, she was consumed with helping her mom figure out where they were going to live.

In some ways she had been closer to her dad until then. Raising a competitive gymnast comes with a lot of extra work for parents.

"He took me to practice (at the MAC, the Multnomah Athletic Club in downtown Portland), he took me to school, he would pick me up from practice and that kind of stuff. He planned the travel and got me to my meets. Of course, my mom came to every single one of them as well. I just grew accustomed to it being 'Destinee and her dad.' Then when he left there was no point."

Without a regular ride to the MAC, Davis essentially stopped going to the gym.

"I was dealing with a lot of thoughts about what I wanted to do. ... It's almost as if because my dad left, I hated gymnastics because he was so involved with it up until that point. The memory of him being a great dad was intertwined with the fabric that made up the sport in my eyes. ... I just hated the sport for a while. It was that simple, and I was completely fine with being done with it."

Terri, Destinee and Deven soon moved in with some long-time family friends, Kenny and Angie Knight.

"Things were much better when we were with the Knights," Davis recalled. "The three of us got really close with their family. I went to school with their kids, it was like I basically had new siblings. I would consider Angie as a second mom or a really cool aunt."

For nearly two and a half years, she didn't compete and rarely showed up for practice. She loved seeing her teammates but had lost the fire it takes to be a competitive gymnast. Still, Terri and Angie encouraged her to return to the sport.

"There were a lot of people involved in the process and my mom was the first to tell me: 'You're going back to the gym. You're not quitting gymnastics. You can't sit around and let your dad take your life from you.' As soon as she said those words, I was mentally willing to go to the gym and make an effort. ... She knew that I needed to be pushed and that's exactly what she did. Today I can say that she's my hero and one of my best friends. She always put a roof over our heads and made sure we had food. She made sure we had fun with friends and that I had a car when I turned 16. ... She is one of the strongest women I know and I look up to her every day."

The 30-to-45-minute ride each way to the MAC was daunting for her, so Angie took her to practice and she caught rides home with teammates.

Davis first met OSU's Tanya Chaplin early in her senior year, when she still wasn't sure whether she wanted to try for college gymnastics.

"Des was one of those shining stars coming up as a young gymnast," Chaplin recalled. "And when you watch her you still see that talent in her. Then when you listen to her story and hear what she's gone through, we felt that if we could provide a place where she could feel stable, she could flourish. We were keeping an eye on her throughout her high school years."

Chaplin called Davis on a regular basis to keep her updated on the recruiting process. Her grades skyrocketed after her family found stability with the Knights, which proved to be a key when Davis had to write letters to the NCAA seeking eligibility despite a big slump in her GPA. She hadn't taken all of the required core courses, which created another hurdle.

"Tanya, Michael (Chaplin, assistant coach and Tanya's husband) and Brian (Amato, assistant coach), they're a few of the people that really encouraged me to fight ... . I didn't really care if I went to college at the time. When I started talking to them it really shifted me to actually wanting to do something for me."

Davis was no longer in gymnastics shape; her body wouldn't let her do what it once had. More family friends, Irwin and Pam Schimmel, grandparents of Gabrielle Spencer, a teammate at the MAC, stepped forward to help pay her gym membership and Gabrielle's mother, Pam, often drove Davis to practice.

"The Schimmels are extraordinary people that want to see me succeed. I literally would not have been able to do this without them. I will be forever in their debt," she said.

Irwin helped Terri get that first car for Destinee so she could get herself to practices. The Chaplins continued to help her work through the NCAA issues. Former Oregon State All-American gymnast Mary Law, mother of one of Davis' former MAC teammates and a current OSU teammate, Jaime Law, helped with the financial aid paperwork. Terri made sure Destinee applied to every university she could find that had a gymnastics team. Sheila Lehner-Brewer, Davis' beam and floor coach at the MAC, checked her grades and assignments and allowed her to do homework at the gym instead of practicing.

"There were so many people behind the scenes to help me make it happen," Davis said.

At Oregon State, Chaplin didn't have a scholarship to offer. Still she continued to push Davis to find a program that could offer one, insisting that 'we'll get you in somewhere' even when it seemed unlikely she would be a Beaver, meanwhile promising that OSU had a spot for her as a non-scholarship athlete.

"That was so nice," Davis said. "Tanya just encouraged me to believe in myself and take care of things so I could go somewhere. Then I visited Oregon State, looked at the school, and the coaching staff was so nice and helpful. I kept having thoughts that, 'I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be at Oregon State.'"

Chaplin recalled: "As we were going through the process, we learned that Destinee isn't the most outgoing person at first. She's more of a one-on-one person and as you get to know her you realize, 'Wow. There's a lot right there and you want to see that flourish and succeed.' That's what I'm here for, not just winning and losing. You want to teach and help these young people have an opportunity."

Davis committed to Oregon State and being a gymnastics walk-on, relying on non-athletic financial aid.

"The next thing I knew, I was in the BEST program (which brings first-year student-athletes to campus early and helps them get a jump on their academics) and I was like 'Hey! I'm doing this!'"

That December, Chaplin called Davis into her office and said she had a Christmas present.

"It was my scholarship!" Davis said. "Best present ever! I traveled back home for Christmas and didn't sign the paper until I was with my mom. She didn't know until I told her on Christmas Eve. When I signed it, we both cried and the first thing she said to me was, 'Destinee, you did this for yourself.'"

Davis entered Oregon State on a team that included 10 freshmen and an impressive group of six seniors.

"I didn't get in trouble and I wasn't a bad student, but I had a hard time," she said. "I had a lot of confidence issues ... Tanya was always building me up, but it was intimidating to be on such a great team."

As a sophomore in early 2018, Davis didn't compete in the season-opener at Pittsburgh, but the next week she was in the beam lineup at Utah, performing in front of nearly 15,000 fans. The week after that, in addition to beam, she appeared in the vault lineup and in an exhibition floor exercise against Stanford.

Her coaches urged her to stop overthinking and trust herself more. Her teammates lifted her spirits.

"We really banded together during the preseason," Davis said. "We all truly love each other. We're a family and even when it got hard, we never gave up on each other for a second. We call it 'The Grind' because it grinds you to dust and when you slightly recover, it grinds you even worse. But then, the season comes and you're all sparkly and you make it work."

The Beavers begin their chase to return to the postseason for the 46th consecutive year at a quadrangular meet at Illinois, along with Air Force and Kentucky, on January 13. Davis and her teammates return to Corvallis to host Pac-12 rival Utah, January 19 at Gill Coliseum.

Jason Amberg is an assistant communications director for OSU Athletics.