Broken lamps and smashed records: The story of Missouri gymnastics star Jocelyn Moore

Jocelyn Moore’s career started with a pair of broken lamps and a shattered glass table.

The Missouri gymnastics star, 7 years old at the time, had been going to recreational classes, joined a club in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and started competing with the Jersey Optional Gymnastics Association.

Problem was … she was bringing the routines home.

“We just thought it was a good way for her to get all the energy out,” said Jacqueline Moore, Jocelyn’s mother. … “My living room furniture was very sparse because she broke everything.”

Jocelyn Moore, now a junior with Mizzou, has become a little more coordinated since then.

The accidental living room redecorations have turned into an MU record-book refurbishing.

Women's basketball: Mizzou women’s basketball to retain head coach Robin Pingeton | Report

Men's basketball: Missouri basketball adding Rob Summers as assistant coach

Moore earned the second perfect score of her MU career, this one on the floor, on March 17 in Champaign, Illinois. The 10s came in different disciplines, which is something that had never been done in Missouri history, after a perfect score on vault last season. The 10 on the floor was a program-first in the discipline, too.

Moore was named the SEC Event Specialist of the Year last Thursday. She is a two-time All-American. On March 23 in New Orleans, she helped lead the Tigers to an afternoon session win at the SEC Tournament and fifth place in the nation’s premier league.

Now, Moore and the Tigers will take the No. 13 seed to the NCAA Regionals beginning Friday in Gainesville, Florida, where they’ll compete against No. 4 Florida, Georgia and Clemson or Iowa State for a spot in the regional finals.

That’s a fair few floor routines from her living room in Hillsborough, New Jersey.

Here’s the story of the remarkable rise of Jocelyn Moore:

A birthday and a faceplant: How Missouri gymnastics star Jocelyn Moore got her start

Before Moore was the SEC Event Specialist of the Year — before she’d ever seen Missouri or a mat — she was a 7-year-old at a friend’s gymnastics-themed birthday party.

And she was a frightened 7-year-old at a friend’s gymnastics-themed birthday party, at that.

“I was actually terrified of the pit,” Moore said. “I didn't realize that it was like soft blocks and I was like, ‘how are people jumping into this thing?’ Oh, man. It was actually really scary.”

Indeed, it’s a wonder she ever stuck with gymnastics.

After overcoming the fear of the pit, her mother spotted some potential intrigue in the sport, so she took her to watch a Rutgers gymnastics meet. Eager-eyed from the stands, now a fresh-faced beginner in the sport, she watched a Scarlet Knight athlete fly wildly off of the bars mid-routine and land face first on the mat. The athlete needed to be carried out on a stretcher.

Jocelyn didn’t like the look of that malarkey. Not at all. Nor was she fond of the sight of the bars the next time she went to a gymnastics class.

But here’s the thing: Mom had a way of convincing her.

Jacqueline Moore persuaded her to hop in the block pit at the birthday party, and guess what? Those blocks turned out to be soft. The future Tiger said she had to be dragged out of the gym after that epiphany.

Mom, post-harrowing spectating experience, then convinced her daughter to stick out the gymnastics practices — and guess what? That worked out, too.

Soon, while she wasn’t knocking lamps off tables, she outgrew the Jersey Optional Gymnastics Association program and joined a USA Gymnastics gym, where she began leaping and bounding through the levels that normally take years apiece to knock out.

“Within one season,” Jacqueline Moore said, “she skipped all the way through.”

All the way through to a career-altering venture.

Arena Gymnastics to Missouri

Moore was talented, but she was raw. Arena Gymnastics coach Ann Kolasa, who met the Moore family at a USA Gymnastics event, saw the flaws in her technique, but she also saw potential.

“She's got power,” Kolasa assessed, “like Simone Biles.”

Moore joined Arena Gymnastics when she was a freshman in high school. Both Jocelyn and Jacqueline come to the same assessment at the mention of Kolasa: That’s the coach who saved Moore’s career.

You can look at that from a couple of different directions.

First and foremost, Kolasa took Jocelyn Moore to a new level.

“She brought out a level of gymnastics in Jocelyn that we never saw,” Jacqueline Moore said. “You know how they say sometimes you have the skill and the talent but you just need the right type of coach to bring it out? Ann was that kind of coach.

… “She knew what Jocelyn could do. We didn't see it until she got with Ann.”

Kolasa immediately recognized what she had with Moore’s raw power, calling her a “diamond in the rough.” The key was finding a way to help Moore control her mighty punch.

Moore, who Kolasa said had a late start in the sport compared to most of the athletes she has coached, hadn’t learned how to execute twists, but her basic layout was “world class,” Kolasa said. Moore said when she arrived at Arena Gymnastics, she had to relearn some fundamentals.

That didn’t prove to be too much to handle.

“She learns very fast, so it wasn't hard. It was really fun. I wish they all came that way,” Kolasa said. “ I mean, things that would normally take years to develop, she was learning in months.”

The coach said there are gymnasts she worked with whose strengths were the “beautiful lines” and “pointed feet” they could create mid-routine. That was not Moore’s forte.

“Jocelyn’s strength,” Kolasa said, “has always been how high she can fly.”

Fitting.

Some prospective colleges didn’t see what Kolasa saw, telling the coach that Moore didn’t have the required skill set for them to take the leap.

That’s where the second reason Moore says Kolasa “saved her career” applies. The coach knew Shannon Welker, Missouri’s head gymnastics coach, and he trusted her word just as much as the caliber of gymnasts she was molding.

Welker was originally recruiting another one of Kolasa’s students, but that prospect committed to Georgia. That’s when Kolasa told the Mizzou coach to take a look at one of her high school sophomores: Jocelyn Moore.

“(Kolasa) gives me a call,” Welker said, “and she says, ‘Shannon, you’ve gotta come look at this. I got another kid. She’s a little raw, we just got her, but I think she's gonna be big.’”

Welker took the leap.

“Boy,” he said, “was it the right route.”

The potential Kolasa had seen came to fruition.

Shortly after Moore committed to MU, she finished third in the national championships on vault, Kolasa said. As a high school senior, Moore won the national title on vault and finished second in the nation in the all-around.

“I'm so grateful for them (Kolasa and her husband, Valdi) for seeing something in me and helping me develop it,” Moore said. “I remember coming to the gym, and I was not the greatest gymnast. My form? Not very pretty.

“But they didn't take that and (say), ‘what are we doing with this?’ Like, they were able to find the things I was good at, my strengths, and helped me embody them.”

Tigers head to regionals

There’s a sense around camp that this might be Missouri gymnastics’ time for a run.

The Tigers went down to New Orleans on March 23 and won the afternoon session of the SEC Tournament, falling just short of tracking down the top four teams in the evening session.

Now, No. 13-seeded Missouri takes a trip to Florida to face the No. 4-seeded Gators, Georgia and Iowa State or Clemson in the NCAA Regionals beginning Friday evening. The two highest scoring teams will advance out of that pod, with a likely meetup with No. 5 Utah and No. 12 Michigan State awaiting in the regional finals later in the weekend.

Heading to Florida for MU: Three All-Americans, Jocelyn Moore included, an SEC-best seven all-conference performers, Moore included, and the SEC Event Specialist of the Year: Jocelyn Moore.

“I think the optimism is at a high right now,” Welker said. … “We have the talent here. It's just a matter of getting it to gel and finding that little solution, that little thing that pushes us over the top. So I certainly think that they're feeling really confident about themselves.”

The Tigers won’t be making any wholesale changes. They know what they have and what’s possible for this roster — award season backed that up. MU seniors Sienna Schreiber and Mara Titarsolej both have perfect scores this season, coming on the beam and bars, respectively. Mizzou ranks No. 8 in the nation for its national qualifying score on the floor; No. 11 on the bars; No. 12 on the bars; and No. 22 on the beam.

Now it’s a case of putting it all together.

“We're at the point of season right now where there's no big adjustments happening,” Jocelyn Moore said. “It's going to be fine tuning those little details that are going to matter, and those little details are the things that offset teams from one another. Like, whether that's the form or the landings, those little details are really going to come into play for us here at regionals.”

‘Music makes me lose control’

Before the Hearnes Center, before Arena Gymnastics and before the broken living room lamps, there was Missy Elliott and a Buffalo Bills jersey.

Jocelyn’s father is from Buffalo, New York, which “by default” makes the family Bills fans.

That explains the broken furniture.

The family bought Jocelyn a Bills sweatshirt when she was a toddler, and as if by some Bills Mafia-induced manifestation, it brought out a side of their daughter they’d see for years to come.

“If this sweater came on, she was so sassy and so funny,” Jacqueline Moore said. “You know, it was as if she needed the shirt to bring out everything. As she's gotten older, she’s not shy anymore. She used to be a very shy kid, and then it just came out.”

Moore’s outgoing side became more and more common. The signs of routines to come were being revealed.

Music — like it does during her Missouri floor routines — was the other great catalyst.

Her father would put the Missy Elliott song ‘Lose Control’ on, and the song did exactly what the chorus theorizes: “Music makes me lose control.”

“Her dad would put that on, and Jocelyn would just go crazy,” Jacqueline Moore said. “We loved it. It was so funny. … He would put that song on, and she'd just get to dancing.”

From then on, she was always moving to the beat. She was a member of her church’s praise dance group as a child, and would dance in the aisles during sermons. Moore did ballet at the Princeton Ballet School, although admits now that might not have been her forte.

“My parents would play music and I would go crazy just pulling out all the dance moves all the stops,” Jocelyn Moore said. “Were they good? Maybe not. But I did it, and I was having fun.”

Vault is where Moore earned her first perfect score in college, as a sophomore in a meet against Auburn at the Hearnes Center. But it’s on the floor, with the music flowing, where she has excelled in Columbia.

Even now, the music that soundtracks the floor routines that have seen her score 12 straight 9.9s or higher, have her mother’s fingerprints all over them.

Jacqueline Moore is aware that the routines need to have a personal touch. In the fall ahead of the 2023-24 season — with months and months of musical replays awaiting with the season lasting until April — she told her daughter to make the song matter; something she wouldn’t get sick of; something that would help her express herself.

“I'm always trying to tell her to think about what she likes,” Jacqueline Moore said. … “You know, you can express yourself through music, and being African American, I was telling her to think about ways in which (she) could express herself through African beats and African drums, and in all three of her (career) floor routines, you hear that Afro-Caribbean beat. … It allows her to express herself.”

There’d been successful routines before. In her freshman year, she recorded a 9.950 in the NCAA Regional Final. As a sophomore, Moore tied the previous program best, twice, at 9.975.

But before the season, Moore sent her mother a new song as she tinkered in search of the next step. Jacqueline Moore loved it.

This one was a hit.

At long last

Jacqueline Moore, normally present at all of Jocelyn’s meets, wasn’t in Champaign, Illinois.

With it being hosted in southern Illinois and since it was the Tigers’ regular-season finale — with a full postseason worth of meets upcoming that would get special attention — Jacqueline tuned into the TV instead of traveling to the Illini campus to watch Jocelyn compete.

Jocelyn took the floor, where she’d managed 12 straight 9.9 or higher scores.

Behind the scenes at the Tigers’ practice facility, Moore and the MU coaching staff had pinpointed the moments she believed judges were docking her score. She’d believed, somewhere intermingled among that run of a dozen, that there had been 10-worthy routines.

But the magic number hadn’t shown. So she tinkered, adjusted, and honed.

“I think she's really starting to understand, like, this is a process,” Welker said. “I'm competing against the best in the country. … If we have a performance that is not up to where she wants it, well, I think she's learned to say, ‘OK, look, that is what it is, and I guess I have to do a couple of things here, and we're gonna move forward.’”

The Afrobeat music started. Jacqueline Moore’s focus narrowed in on the television screen. Jocelyn Moore’s focus turned, too.

Kolasa has seen it before.

“It's like a look in her eye,” Kolasa said. “(You) just know, she goes to a different place; a different level. She's got laser focus.”

There’d been so many close calls. Moore already owned two 9.975 scores on the floor. But the perfect score had thus far been elusive.

Until March 17.

The raw power Welker saw and trusted on his recruiting visit flashed. The fundamentals Kolasa coached were flawless. The always-dancing, sometimes-crashing child was in her element.

The music stopped; the judge put up the 10.

Jacqueline jumped around the New Jersey house. Nearly 1,000 miles away, so did Moore and all of her teammates and coaches in the Illinois gym. Jacqueline screamed and hollered. The family dog began to bark.

There was gymnastics on the living room floor again.

This time, the lamps and tables survived.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Breaking lamps, records: The story of Mizzou gymnastics' Jocelyn Moore