Overview:
Mari-Rae Sopper gave up a promising law career in Washington D.C. to pursue her dream of coaching collegiate gymnastics at UCSB
Jen Rudy had marked the big day on her calendar.
September 11, 2001.
Her new coach was coming to Santa Barbara.
Rudy, captain of the UC Santa Barbara women’s gymnastics team, had volunteered to pick her up at the airport.
The Gaucho senior had gone to the mat in lobbying the Gauchos to hire Mari-Rae Sopper, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who wanted to return to coaching.
She’d known and admired her for eight years.
Rudy even planned to help her find a place to live and then host a welcoming barbecue the next day.
But September 11, 2001, didn’t go as planned for anyone.
“My dad called and woke me up at 7:15 in the morning,” she told me later. “He said that some planes had crashed into the towers at the World Trade Center, so I turned on the news.”
She soon learned that another plane — American Airlines Flight 77, bound for Los Angeles from Washington’s Dulles International Airport — had slammed into the Pentagon like a giant, guided missile.
“I stayed glued to the TV, watching what was going on,” Rudy said. “I wasn’t even thinking about what flight Mari-Rae was on.
“But then I got a call from Alice.”
Alice Henry, UCSB’s senior women’s athletic administrator at the time, had Sopper’s flight itinerary … and a very loaded question.
“Is there a chance that Mari-Rae didn’t get on her flight?” she asked haltingly.
That’s when Rudy put it all together.
“I dropped the phone and my body went completely numb,” she said. “I cried hysterically for hours.”
Rudy first met Sopper during her youth gymnastics days. She also knew that the ultra-dutiful coach would never miss a flight.
Sopper, 35, was indeed among the 64 passengers — six crew members and five hijackers included — aboard the Boeing 757 that crashed into the western façade of the Pentagon.
Another 125 were killed on the ground.
Burned into Memory
We all remember where we were that horrific day.
My cousin, Jim Therry, was actually at the Pentagon, working on its renovation.
“I was in the construction shack on the other side of the North Parking Lot,” he said. “I was going to be heading over to the building in just a few … to the very spot.”
He was delayed by a news alert that the North Tower at the World Trade Center had been struck by an airliner.
“I told my office mate about how my aunt, Pat, had been in the Empire State Building when it was hit by a plane in the fog during World War II,” Jim said.
“Went back to work … Then we started to get word of another plane.
“Then there was an explosion outside.”
He ran out in time to see a fireball rise on the western side of the Pentagon.
“I crossed myself,” he said.
I remember conducting some of the toughest phone interviews of my sportswriting career that day.
My daughter, Megan, a freshman recruit on UCSB’s softball team, was roommates with Brittany Gard, one of the freshman gymnasts. Gard couldn’t bear to return my call.
My call to junior Cara Simkins got her to face the surreality of their loss.
“We were supposed to get together with her on Sunday in a meet-the-team barbecue,” she told me. “We had been emailing her, and her emails were so enthusiastic.
“Her arms were so wide open for us. She cared so much.”
Sophomore Lesley Ross could barely choke out her thoughts.
“She was getting us all pumped up to come back,” she finally said.
All But Forgotten
Friday will mark the 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.
A memorial to honor Sopper was placed in one of the glass cases inside UCSB’s Phil Womble Hall of Champions 18 years ago.
It includes the Sports Illustrated 9/11 issue that features a story about Sopper written by UCSB alum Josh Elliott.
But the 25th anniversary of that day will pass at the university with nary a mention of Sopper.
Few UCSB officials from those days are still on campus.
Nothing remains of the Gaucho gymnastics program, women or men.
The university dropped the sport several months before the first anniversary of 9/11.
The events of that day, however, will remain personally painful to UCSB’s last band of gymnasts … and to Rudy in particular.
“It’s been a real hard thing for me to deal with,” she said on the first anniversary of 9/11. “I know I shouldn’t feel responsible, but I kind of feel like I made them hire her.
“That’s stuck with me. That’s been hard.”
They met when Rudy was just a freshman at Cherry Creek High School in Englewood, Colorado. Sopper was coaching at the time for the Colorado Gymnastics Institute in nearby Aurora.
“We competed against her team every weekend,” Rudy said. “She coached all of my best friends.”
Sopper, a two-time MVP at Iowa State, was in Colorado to earn her law degree at the University of Denver.
She served as a Navy officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps from 1996 to 2000 but kept her hand in the sport as an assistant coach and choreographer for the U.S. Naval Academy.
Sopper was still serving in the Navy Reserve when she was hired as a litigation associate by Schmeltzer, Aptaker & Shepard, a Washington firm that specialized in franchise law.
But the job wasn’t how she wanted to spend her life.
“She felt she was going against the underdog,” said her late father, Bill Sopper.
Walk-On Tall
She’d always identified with the underdog.
Even her mother, Marion Kminek, admitted that “She was never a great gymnast … She just worked harder than everyone else.”
Sopper had walked on to Iowa State’s powerhouse program without a scholarship in 1983.
By 1988, she was the Cyclones’ captain and two-time winner of their Most Valuable Gymnast award.
“Mari-Rae was one of those gymnasts who gave 110% for herself and the school,” then-ISU coach Amy Pyle said.
“She was a competitor, not afraid to speak up whether you wanted to hear it or not.”
She took that spirit with her into the JAG Corps. A fellow officer penned a tribute on her memorial page that noted her “staunch” advocacy for children’s rights.
“While at Appellate Defense, she was a dedicated mentor to a child at-risk from a very poor middle school district in Alexandria, Virginia,” he wrote.
“We had an incredibly large caseload there, and there was no free time to spare.
“But Mari-Rae took a couple hours a week anyway to go see this kid, even though it meant working later or over the weekend.”
Sopper was willing to forfeit her high-paying job to devote herself fully to gymnastics. She began applying for college coaching jobs all over the country in October 2000.
Months went by without any takers.
She was first on Rudy’s list for a replacement at UCSB, however, when Megan Fenton resigned as the Gauchos’ coach in the spring of 2001.
She got the opportunity to approach Sopper while serving a summer internship in Washington.
Rudy was surprised to learn that she had already sent her application to UCSB.
“I got in touch with her and spent a lot of time with her that summer,” Rudy said. “I was amazed to find that she already knew everything about us — she had researched all of the girls.
“I started calling all my teammates, encouraging them to hassle the athletic department at least once a week to hire Mari-Rae.”
Leap of Faith
UCSB made her application seem like a waste of time when athletic director Gary Cunningham notified the team on Aug. 9, 2001, that cuts were being made to meet the department’s budget.
Both the men’s and women’s gymnastics teams had to be terminated immediately.
“It was a program that, cost-wise and logic-wise with the schools that we competed against, didn’t fit into our program here,” Cunningham explained. “It was a hard thing to do, but it was something we felt we had to do.
“That was after consulting with a lot of people.”
His announcement served only to unleash the inner-underdog in Mari-Rae Sopper.
“I called Mari-Rae and told her,” Rudy said. “I was astonished to hear her response.
“She told me how to build a campaign to reinstate our program, who we needed to contact and what we needed to do.”
The gymnasts requested a meeting with Cunningham. They argued that dropping their programs so late gave them no time to transfer to another school.
The argument struck a chord with the former UCLA basketball star. He agreed to give both teams a one-year reprieve.
“She rallied me up and, four days later, my team and I got our program back,” Rudy said. “It was amazing.
“She wasn’t even our coach yet, and she did more for us in those four days than anyone else.”
Rudy felt so inspired that she immediately pressed UCSB about the coaching situation.
“I stormed into the athletic department the next day and demanded that Mari-Rae be our coach,” she said.
“A few days later, they brought me into the office and told me that she indeed would be our new coach for the year.”
Sopper didn’t plan to settle for a one-and-done situation. She was headed to Santa Barbara with big plans for a fundraising campaign to keep the program afloat for years to come.
But she never got there.
Former Gaucho Alanna Trimble was hired to take her place on an interim basis.
The whole program continued on an interim basis.
The Final Season
Sopper’s mother took up the torch to save Gaucho gymnastics. She and her husband, Frank Kminek, launched a fund-raising drive in Mari-Rae’s memory.
They even flew from Chicago to Santa Barbara to rally support and attend a Feb. 16 meet.
Rudy, of course, picked them up at the airport.
“We all broke down a couple of times when they got off the plane,” she said.
The Kmineks raised $70,000 and received another $40,000 in pledges in their effort to save UCSB women’s gymnastics.
But that fell well short of the $4 million that Cunningham said was required to create an endowment for permanent funding.
The program died less than a year after its coach.
“In all honesty, they set us up for failure,” Rudy said. “I don’t think even Notre Dame football could’ve raised $4 million in eight months.”
She graduated from UCSB that spring.
“I was the only senior, and so I tried to help the other girls transfer,” Rudy said. “Only two wanted to.”
She understood.
“Our team had been on an emotional roller coaster,” she said. “It was such a heartbreaking year.”
But not all was buried in the rubble at the Pentagon. A firm resolve arose all over the country from the ashes of 9/11.
Rudy could feel Sopper come alive within her as “a role model” when Marion and Frank watched her compete in the final home meet of her life.
“It was something I’m going to remember for the rest of my life,” she said.
It will be the theme for our nation this Friday.
