Karl Gehring/Journal-World Illustration High School Athletes of the Year

Lawrence High senior Abby Jones competes in the uneven parallel bars during the state gymnastics championships. Jones won the individual all-around title last November.

Lawrence High senior Abby Jones smiles after landing a jump on the balance beam during the Free State Invitational. Jones won the individual all-around title at the invite last fall - and at every other meet she competed in on her way to the gold medal at the state meet.

She was 5 years old, maybe 6. Either way, it was a long time ago. Abby Jones, who recently graduated with honors from Lawrence High, remembers clearly the time she was thrown by a pony at her grandmother’s house.

“I was trying to get him to trot, and he just started running,” Jones said. “He was running toward the fence, so I ducked down. I broke the boards of the fence with my head and was hurled off the horse. I was like, ‘Ouch.'”

Ouch? No tears?

“No, I didn’t cry,” Jones said.

Why not?

“I just don’t cry,” she said. “It makes you look like a little baby.”

So began a lifetime of aerial adventures, thrills and spills, flirtations with danger for the second of three children born to Joe and Nancy Jones. Tears and fears aren’t part of Abby’s world. She does her best work in the air, competing, and almost always winning.

At the state gymnastics meet last fall, Jones earned a gold medal in all four events – vault, balance beam, uneven bars, and floor exercise – on her way to setting an all-around state scoring record.

Throughout the season, her coach, Kathy Johnson, gave her increasingly challenging scoring goals and she repeatedly surpassed them. She knew precisely the score she needed in the final event to get the state record because she was keeping score in her head the whole day. Shortly after sweeping the state meet, Jones appeared in “Faces in the Crowd,” Sports Illustrated’s long-standing feature.

In the spring, Jones cleared 11 feet, 6 inches to break a Lawrence High pole vault record she had tied the previous year. At the state meet, she took home a bronze medal.

Her two-sport domination earned Jones recognition as the Journal World’s city high school Female Athlete of the Year.

Don’t let the softness of her features, the high pitch to her voice, the illuminating smile, fool you. Abby Jones is one tough athlete, one fierce competitor.

Consider the injuries she rebounded from to continue her athletic careers. As a club gymnast, she broke her finger, then her hand, then her back, none of which caused her to quit the sport. Between gymnastics and track and field seasons, Jones was a cheerleader. At a winter cheerleading clinic, a boy challenged her to do a double-full maneuver, said he would do one if she would.

“OK,” Jones told him.

Mistake.

“I hadn’t really warmed up,” she said. “I could tell it was going to be a bad one when I took off. I was leaning back and barely made it around to one-and-three-quarters. My shoes got caught and I was trying to turn. I was like, ‘Ouch.’ ”

Again, no tears, despite a dislocated kneecap. A snapshot of her being carried off on a stretcher, smiling with a thumbs-up gesture, doesn’t take anybody who knows her by surprise.

“I was just sitting there, kind of shocked at first, then I was like, yeah, cool,” she said. “It was really cool looking. It looked really weird to look at your leg and it (the kneecap) is not there, it was over here.”

The injury put her pole vaulting season in jeopardy, but she recovered quickly enough to shatter the school record.

She did not begin pole vaulting until her junior year. She did not compete for Lawrence High in gymnastics until her final two years of high school.

Before that, her mother drove her daily to Kansas City to train with an elite club gymnastics team.

It was on those trips on K-10 that Abby learned to drive a car, traveling at high speeds alongside bigger vehicles.

“That scared my mom,” Abby said. “She’d say, “Oh God, a truck!’ I was like, ‘What? It’s next to us.’ I didn’t even notice them.”

The practices could last five hours. She became so skilled she competed nationally, making trips with her mother to cities as far away as San Diego and Seattle, spending as many as 30 nights a year away from home. Parental backing was there. Parental pressure, Abby said, was not.

“They are really laid-back about it,” she said. “They were not going to push me to do it, but I really wanted to do it and they helped me with it.”

That scenario is not always the case in a sport that can be riddled with obsessive, sometimes back-biting, helicopter parents. Nancy Jones remembered that on one trip as the plane touched down, her and her daughter’s thoughts were on, “checking into the hotel, checking out the hot tub, taking the rental car out to see the city.”

Not so with another gymnast’s father, who turned to his diminutive daughter to remind her of the sole purpose of the trip.

“Are you focused?” he barked into her soul.

Abby looks back on her club days with nothing but fondness. The gym was like, “one big happy family,” she said.

And then it was all taken away from her. The coaches from whom she had learned so much, the coaches who didn’t hold it against her that she was bigger than the stereotypical tiny gymnast, picked up and moved to Oklahoma. The girl who doesn’t cry opened up like a water-main break.

“I cried for weeks,” said Jones, a well-toned athlete who stands 5-foot-6 and weighs 125 pounds.

She begged her parents to move to Oklahoma. Her father drew the line. He wasn’t about to uproot his family for gymnastics.

“I understand,” Abby said, looking back. “It wouldn’t be fair for the rest of the family.”

Besides, she said, “after my back got hurt, I would have been mad if we moved there and I couldn’t compete.”

A stress fracture of the back spelled the end to her club gymnastics career. In Jones’ junior year, her friend Lindsey Fisher convinced her to come out for the high school team, even though Jones couldn’t arch her back at the time and was limited to two of the four events (beam and bars) initially. Before the state meet, Fisher convinced Jones to try the vault for the first time in more than a year. She did so and had the team’s best score.

Executing in the clutch became a trademark for Jones, who won every meet her senior year.

What’s next for the athlete who so naturally blends power and grace, speed and agility? She’s not sure.

She knows she is enrolling at Kansas University, which does not have a gymnastics program. The idea of cheerleading in college appeals to her.

“It looks like it would be fun,” she said. “You can be all peppy and everything, and you get to travel to the games. I think that would be cool.”

The thought of pole vaulting for KU as a walk-on appeals to her as well.

“It’s kind of fun flying up there, floating down,” she said. “It’s a lot different feeling than gymnastics. In the pole vault, you seem more loose up there. In gymnastics, you always feel so precise and tight and you want to feel exactly where you are. … I have a chance to go a lot higher. There are technique things that get me to fly away off the pole. Right now I’m just flagging out and that’s as high as my hips go, but if I pull off the pole I’ll shoot up instead of just shooting out. When the season was ending we were just getting that stuff down.”

Next on her agenda is a class trip to Italy and Greece later this month.

Soon, she will be a college student. If she makes either the cheerleading squad or the track team she will fall from time to time. And when she does, she will get right back on her feet, right back in the air, her smile letting the world know not to worry about Abby Jones.