A broken toe limited UAA gymnast Simone Penker at the conference championships last March, but Penker is back in the gym and preparing for another championship meet -- one of the biggest in her career.
Penker, 21, will represent UAA and her home country of Austria at the World University Games next month in Gwangju, South Korea.
The July 3-14 international meet will draw some 9,000 college athletes from around the world. Penker will be the only athlete from UAA at the competition, and she'll be the only gymnast on the Austrian team.
The meet will mark Penker's second major international competition in less than a year. She was a member of the Austrian team that placed 22nd at the world championships last October in China.
Accompanying Penker to Korea will be UAA gymnastics coach Paul Stoklos, who said the broken toe forced Penker to take a much-needed break from training. Penker trained pretty much non-stop for more than a year because of her preparations for last October's world championships in China, which were sandwiched between her sophomore and junior seasons at UAA.
"When she first said she wanted to do this, she was pretty fried," Stoklos said. "I told her 'If you're gonna do this, you have to take a month break.' Then she broke her toe before the conference meet and she was out seven to eight weeks, so she took a big break."
Penker, a 4.0 student who will be a senior next season, used part of her time away from training to travel home to Austria after the school year ended.
She returned to Anchorage last month to resume training at UAA.
An all-arounder throughout most of the college season, Penker broke her toe shortly before the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation championships at the Alaska Airlines Center in March. She was able to participate in uneven parallel bars at the conference championships but the injury kept her out of floor exercise, balance beam and vault.
Though hobbled by the broken toe, Penker tied for 19th place in bars with a score of 9.625, a full .10 off her personal best, set in her freshman season.
Three of her five PRs were set during the 2015 college season -- 9.825 in floor, 9.75 in beam and 38.675 in all-around. Her personal best in vault is 9.7, set in 2013.
Penker will compete in all four events in Korea.