NCAA all-around champion Maile O'Keefe: How opportunity knocked and I answered
The Utah women's gymnastics senior won the NCAA all-around title in a season where she nearly did not compete on the vault: "We kind of just take every opportunity and seize the moment," she said in this exclusive interview.
Artistic Gymnastics
Utah gymnastics senior Maile O’Keefe hadn’t planned on vaulting during the 2023 season.
The last time the recently crowned NCAA all-around champion had vaulted was over the summer.
“I think I went over the horse one time last summer,” O’Keefe said with a laugh in a recent exclusive interview with Olympics.com.
But injuries to her teammates, including Tokyo 2020 Olympic team silver medallist Grace McCallum, meant O’Keefe was called up.
“If anything, I just felt like I could help if they needed me and if I could do that, I wanted to,” explained O’Keefe. “You know, just kind of adding depth to our team was really all I was there to do.”
The lack of training time, says O’Keefe, might have been for the best in the end.
“For vault, that’s kind of a weird event for me. I do much better with less repetition,” she said. “Once I start to do too much, I start to think too much and it just goes downhill from there. So, honestly, it probably worked out the best way it could.”
Maile O'Keefe: Seizing the moment
The Utes, which finished third as a team at the NCAAs, have encountered some bumps in the road throughout their season – the biggest, perhaps, the injury to McCallum.
O’Keefe describes the Olympic medallist as “a spark for us on all four events.”
“[Head coach] Tom [Farden] liked to say that we’re opportunists. We kind of just take every opportunity and seize the moment,” said O’Keefe.
It’s a fitting description especially for the senior, who will return for a fifth season next year. The opportunity presented by McCallum’s absence presented an all-around opportunity for O’Keefe.
She seized it, winning the NCAA all-around title in what was a surprise even to herself.
“I was not thinking about that all-around title at all, mainly because I don’t do a 10.0 start value vault,” explained O’Keefe. “I automatically have a little lower of a set point.”
By the time O’Keefe arrived at the final rotation on her best event the balance beam, she needed to be early perfect to pass UCLA’s Jordan Chiles, another member of the U.S. squad that won silver at the Tokyo Games.
“I was mainly kind of focused on just doing a nice routine and setting up Grace really well,” O’Keefe said of her mindset during that all-around title clinching routine. “I also had kind of been ‘hunting’ for that beam title for a while.”
She got both, scoring a perfect 10.0 on the routine.
Winning the all-around crown was so far from her mind, that O’Keefe was caught slightly off guard by the news.
“I actually had the headset on for my [ESPN] interview, and I wasn’t actually live on air yet, but I could hear them talking on the TV and stuff, and they’re like, ‘We’re going to have an interview with your NCAA beam and all-around champion,’ and my mouth just dropped open,” recalled O’Keefe. “I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ It was really exciting, very, very unexpected.”
Maile O'Keefe: A new winning mindset
O’Keefe has spent four years among the upper echelon of NCAA women’s gymnastics very best.
But in a sport focused on superstars like Sunisa Lee, Jade Carey, Chiles and Trinity Thomas, she’s often found herself in the shadows.
That’s ok, she says.
“I’ve never been a huge fan of all the limelight,” said O’Keefe. “I’ve known most of [the big name athletes] for a very long time, and I think it’s really cool that we’re all on the same platform.”
Still, O’Keefe has made a name for herself. She scored six perfect 10.0s (out of 14 total appearances) on the balance beam, including during both days of competition at the NCAAs. She only dipped below 9.900 once – when she slipped off the apparatus on her opening element against Oregon State University.
She credits associated head coach Carly Dockendorf with her consistent excellence on the pressure-packed event.
“At this point in our careers, it’s lot more mental than it is physical. We’re all very capable of doing our gymnastics day in, day out, in our sleep, with our eyes closed,” said O’Keefe. “She’s really kind of helped me settle into my mindset.
“We talk about being perfect and getting a ten,” she continued, “and my mindset going into every routine, or at least my really great ones felt like I wasn’t trying to perfect because the more I tried, the worse it got.”
She also finds herself at a new point her career: her final season. O’Keefe will return for the 2024 season, a fifth year granted by the NCAA due to COVID-19, alongside three members of her class in Jaedyn Rucker and Abby Paulson.
“I feel like I’m really just looking forward to enjoying the moment and enjoying every thing next year,” said O’Keefe of next year. “Every day will be last whatever.”
And who knows what opportunities she’ll seize a final time.