The baseball scout who discovered a gymnastics prodigy: his 7-year-old daughter

Publish date: 2024-05-05

Inside the kitchen, a solemn tradition is in the offing. A pot of water boils, awaiting the arrival of noodles. Once combined, they will simmer until they soften to just the right degree. Then Deric Ladnier strains them, coats them in sauce and, finally, slides a plate of steaming pasta in front of his daughter, a 7-year-old gymnast named Saylor.

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These aren’t just any noodles, he reminds her. No, this is “Don’t Fall Off the Beam Pasta.”

This meal has become a ritual for the Ladnier family, a tradition picked up from one of Saylor’s coaches. The next morning will bring a gymnastics meet, and Saylor will compete in four events — the bars, beam, vault and floor. Those night-before noodles are magical, endowing her with special powers of balance and agility. But it has taken some experimentation for the Ladniers to find the right recipe. “One time, we tried the cheap macaroni and cheese and she fell off the beam,” Ladnier says. That hadn’t happened before. “That was bad pasta,” Saylor told him afterward. These days, they stick with fettuccine Alfredo.

It’s a cute scene that might play out between parents and young children in any number of households, but Saylor Ladnier isn’t the average child. Yes, she plays with Barbies and believes in Santa. She’s 7. But her acrobatics on the bars and her grace on the beam suggests something entirely different. Despite beginning serious gymnastic training less than a year ago, Saylor is already on a trajectory toward being one of the best gymnasts in the country. Watch her in action, and that earlier sentence demands different punctuation.

She’s seven?!

Discovering young talent is nothing new to her father, of course. For decades, Ladnier has scouted amateurs and run drafts for a variety of teams in Major League Baseball. He drafted Zack Greinke and Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas for the Royals. With the Diamondbacks, his current team, he selected Alek Thomas, Daulton Varsho and top prospect Corbin Carroll. But this type of talent, in his own house and so young, is new to him. And it has thrown him and his wife, Misty, for a loop.

Saylor is their surprise daughter, a bonus baby who came along just as the youngest of their four other daughters was reaching adulthood. They were practiced parents, and a fifth crack at raising a daughter seemed easy enough. But then Saylor started doing gymnastics.

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She was immediately good, so much so that the Ladniers have had to switch to more challenging gyms twice. Saylor began as a level two on the Junior Olympic scale, performing basic skills that didn’t require her body to leave the ground. In the span of one season, she finished as the level-six champion in bars for the state of Florida, having mastered skills that were much more advanced. Saylor is a special talent, various coaches told her parents, and special talent requires a special commitment.

Ladnier is used to scouting 17-year-olds who reach their primes at 27, but a female gymnast’s progression starts a decade earlier and reaches a peak more quickly. To reach the sport’s pinnacle — classification from USA Gymnastics as an elite gymnast and, for four lucky young women every four years, a spot on the Olympic team — kids must train very young and very hard. It is not for everybody, no matter the talent.

But it does seem to be for Saylor, and her parents have rearranged their lives to support her. She is home-schooled so that she can spend five hours a day at the gym — not counting private instruction or strength and conditioning sessions. Saylor’s current gym is in San Antonio, an 11-hour drive from the family’s longtime home near Pensacola. But it was the place best suited to further Saylor’s ambitions, so a few months ago, the Ladniers packed up and moved there.

They are playing a long shot — Saylor will not be old enough for Olympic competition until the 2032 games — and it may never come to pass. There are talented gymnasts across the country, many Saylor’s age, who are reaching for the same five, interconnected brass rings. They embark upon a grueling journey, filled with long practices and sore muscles and requiring single-minded focus. Many of them will burn out along the way. The same fate could await little Saylor.

The Ladniers are prepared for that. “If she woke up tomorrow and said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ we’d go, ‘Great, let’s do something else,’” says her father. Instead, their daughter awakens each morning with a bounce in her step, a dream in her eye and an uncommon love for the grind. The Olympics are a long way off and the chances of making the Games are exceedingly slim for any gymnast. But, tall as those odds are, Saylor — daughter of a baseball man, only 48 inches tall and tipping the scale at just 53 pounds — has as good a chance as anybody to clear them.

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“You see a lot of dime-a-dozens and there are a lot of kids that are super good, but she has all the cards that you need to be very successful in this sport,” says her current coach, former elite gymnast Jasmine Berry. “This is a perfect kid to follow.”

It sits behind the family’s home in Gulf Breeze, Fla., a small community on a skinny strip of land on the opposite side of Pensacola Bay. The house backs up to Little Sabine Bay, with boats moored to a dock in the background. There, on the grass between the house and the water, is a crudely constructed jungle gym bar.

Saylor was always bounding off this and swinging off that, so Ladnier installed it to give his daughter something to do. Now, it serves as a historical record of her progression as a gymnast. The same way other parents track the growth of their children on a door frame, Ladnier can record Saylor’s advancement on that metal bar — as she got better and better, the bar’s height kept going up and up and up.

At age 5, Saylor began at a local gym in Gulf Breeze, more for recreational purposes than intensive training. She was too young to compete — gymnasts cannot compete until 6 years old — yet she showed immediate aptitude. “She’s probably one of the fastest learners and more talented kids I’ve ever had,” says Paul James Miller, her coach at Gulf Breeze Gymnastics. Miller took her into private instruction immediately, drilling Saylor on the fundamentals and laying a foundation that would soon fuel a rapid advancement.

Late last year, the Ladniers switched Saylor to a new gym down the road — Gulf Coast Gymnastics, not to be confused with Gulf Breeze Gymnastics — which they felt was better equipped to keep up with Saylor’s swift development. The season was already underway and it was a less-than-ideal time to give intensive instruction, but Saylor wasted little time turning heads there as well. Gulf Coast coach Donna Ewing remembers teaching Saylor a skill on the horizontal bar called a free hip circle, in which a gymnast pulls herself up on the bar, holding herself up with rigid arms, and executes a full spin. Saylor mastered it in less than a day, even learning to transition from it into a handstand.

“That normally takes an average gymnast a year,” Ewing says.

There are 10 levels under USA Gymnastics before gymnasts reach elite status, and Saylor climbed four of them in the span of one season. As quickly as she landed at a new level, she either tested out of it or won a meet or two in competition. Because she started so late, Gulf Coast had to request a special waiver to allow her to compete at the Florida state competition in April. Saylor competed at level six — four levels higher than when she began the season in December — and placed first in her division on the bars. That earned her a trip to regionals in Myrtle Beach, where she placed second for her level and division in the same event.

After regionals, the Ladniers drove back to their home in Gulf Breeze and rested their heads on familiar pillows for one last night. The next morning, they hopped in the car and drove 11 hours to their new base of operations in San Antonio. Saylor needed a program for girls with her potential — those who intend to soar past level 10 and into the realm of elite gymnasts, the gymnasts who make the national team and compete all around the world — and Berry’s program had been recommended by a family friend. So, Misty Ladnier had signed a lease for an apartment in San Antonio, called her husband and then informed him they were moving. His response: “OK.”

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At some point over the previous six months — between the lowest and highest bar positions on that backyard apparatus — the Ladniers had become a gymnastics family, evolving beyond special pasta and into special everything, a life reoriented around the pursuit of their daughter’s gymnastic excellence. It’s an incredibly weighty commitment, and one that few families choose or are even equipped to make, but the Ladniers felt as prepared as they could be. This is what it took for their daughter to pursue the thing she loves.

“It’s basically like we’ve gone all-in and let’s see where she ends up,” Ladnier says. “I’m just along for the ride.”

To the uninitiated, the intensity of an elite development program can be shocking. Practices last five hours and are jam-packed with instruction. There is no goofing off. The first time Misty Ladnier sat in the stands to watch her daughter in the new program, she blanched. The intensity of an elite development practice was eye-opening. When Saylor climbed into her car at the end of the session, Misty performed a kind of welfare check. “Are you sure you’re OK? This is good?” she asked her daughter. “Yeah!” Saylor responded.

To become an elite gymnast, there is no way around the kind of all-consuming training that Saylor is now experiencing. “You really won’t achieve being an elite gymnast without putting in the hours,” says Berry, who would know. She was an elite gymnast by 10 years old, an achievement that Saylor currently is on track to match. There are professional athletes who spent less time on their craft than elite hopefuls like Saylor put into gymnastics. Jerry North, her new biomechanics coach, knows. He trains them.

“This is like working with my NFL or NBA guys or baseball guys,” North says. “I’ve got to treat them like I’m treating these 25- to 30-year-old men.”

A sampling of Saylor’s week goes something like this. Six days a week, she wakes up and heads to the gym for five hours of intense practice, which ends in the early afternoon. Once a week, she works with North on her biomechanics, which involves some strength training. (As she is so tiny, North is working on helping her with her vaults.) Additionally, she has private training with Berry. Sometimes there are different clinics and camps sprinkled in. In the afternoons, she has several hours of home-schooling — every weekday during the school year and two days a week during the summer.

It follows, then, that it takes more than the average 7-year-old to hang with that kind of routine. Indeed, Saylor appears to be wired for it. Coaches rave about her focus. She is fearless in a sport where timidity can result in injury. She is driven and determined to pick up new skills and master the tasks before her. Just as importantly, she is not tightly wound nor prone to collapsing in a ball of tears when things do not work out. She has a level-headedness and maturity that her parents aren’t sure they bequeathed her.

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“She gets up every single day and never complains,” Misty says. “Not once has she ever said, ‘I don’t want to go to the gym. I’m too tired to go to the gym. I don’t feel like going to the gym.’ Never.”

Saylor wouldn’t be on this path without her physical skills, but it’s also true that if she were any less precocious, she’d have no chance of reaching that path’s end. Every bit as important is the support system she has at home. It is not a normal part of childhood development to be placed in such a high-pressure environment at such a young age. Plenty of parents and gymnasts decide the elite track is not worth the stress and financial commitment. Those that do choose elite development must be prepared to shepherd a young child through an adult’s competitive environment.

To do that, the Ladniers preserve as much of Saylor’s childhood as they can. “When we come home, we let her play,” Misty says. “We don’t talk about gymnastics.” Saylor takes piano lessons and goes swimming and spends time with her teammates. Outside of gymnastics, she has the same interests as many 7-year-old girls. The Tooth Fairy leaves money under her pillow and the Easter Bunny visits her every spring. “She’s just a baby,” Misty says. Saylor still sleeps with her mom most nights, falling asleep in Misty’s arms.

“Then,” says Misty, still trying to reconcile the little girl in her house with the gymnastics machine she drives to the gym every morning, “she wakes up and trains like a professional athlete.”

Right now, Saylor is training as a level seven, picking up new skills in all four events. For the first time in her young gymnastics career, she will train exclusively for several months before competing again when the new season begins this winter. She is also one of the few in her age group at her gym who have been selected to train for the Talent Opportunity Program, or TOPS, which is a talent search conducted by USA Gymnastics to find the most promising gymnasts between ages 7 and 10. In October, Saylor will be tested on certain physical abilities, and the gymnasts with the top 100 scores participate in the National TOPS Training Camp in December.

That’s the next step toward being an elite gymnast, and it’s a big jump. A handout produced by USA Gymnastics in 2009 helps illustrate the magnitude. That year, there were just more than 7,600 female gymnasts competing at level seven. There were 1,684 gymnasts at level 10. The number of elite gymnasts competing that year? Only 79. For Saylor to progress from her current level to elite, she will have to be in the top 1 percent of her peers.

That means the very best of the best, but those who have worked with her have little doubt she’ll do it. Berry easily sees Saylor reaching level 10 by age 10. “There’s three levels left,” she says. “By the time she’s 10 or 11 years old, she can pretty much be at the highest level possible.” Ewing, Saylor’s coach at her second gym in Florida, is even more certain. “She’s going to be an elite. She’s 100 percent going to be an elite gymnast,” Ewing says, before adding a crucial caveat: “Unless she burns out.”

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Saylor could also hit an ill-timed growth spurt — gymnasts need to be tiny, after all — but burnout is the biggest danger, and one that grows in likelihood the higher she climbs in the sport. It will be 10 years until she’s old enough to qualify for her ultimate goal, the Olympics. Only four gymnasts make the team. It is so distant as to defy accurate prediction — any coach who promises an Olympic spot to a 7-year-old is selling you something — yet it cannot be achieved without this kind of training now. The Ladniers are already considering what such a pursuit will mean. If it’s this intense at 7, what’s it like at 16? “I don’t even know, as a parent, if I even want her to do the Olympics,” Misty admits. “You basically lose your kid.”

But that bridge is farther down the road than San Antonio is from Gulf Breeze, and much time will pass before the Ladniers and Saylor must cross it. She is a happy, and determined, young girl. She springs awake in the morning — “She’ll do a backflip to get out of bed,” Ladnier says — and come home tired and sore, yet also fulfilled. She is chasing a dream. As long as that’s what she wants, as long as she enjoys it, her parents will do everything they can to help her run it down.

To be an elite gymnast requires one to be a living contradiction, simultaneously child and professional. But Ladnier has a video of his daughter that seems to resolve that paradox. In it, a 6-year-old Saylor sits at a table in a rainbow tie-dye leotard. She’d heard her father doing a guest spot on a baseball podcast and then asked her dad to interview her. For two minutes, she answers questions with a matter-of-fact innocence. This is how I focus. I want to get better at back handsprings. At the end, her father thanks her for her time and leaves her with one more query.

If there’s anything you could say to all of your fans out there, what would it be?

Saylor sheepishly studies her palm as she considers her answer, and then leans into the camera, a big smile erupting across her face.

“Don’t let anything hold you back.”

(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos courtesy of the Ladnier family)

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