With a background in dance, plus years of cheerleading, ice skating and beauty pageants, Missouri’s Whitney Crater is immune to the bright lights’ melting powers.

Parker Eshelman photo

Missouri senior gymnast Whitney Crater performs in front of a mirror during practice last week inside the Hearnes Center Fieldhouse. Crater leads the Tigers into tonight’s Big 12 Championships at the Hearnes Center.

Crater doesn’t just perform a routine of saltos, flips and dismounts, Missouri gymnastics Coach Rob Drass explains. She sells it.

Behind the brilliant smile and natural charisma that energize the Hearnes Center for 70 seconds every time Crater performs her floor routine, there lies a carefully planned strategy. A gamesmanship within her showmanship.

"She’s a performer. She sells the routine," Drass said earlier this week. "In gymnastics, you’re really selling your routine to the audience, whether it’s the people in the stands or the judge. You have to get that person involved and forget that they’re judging so they’re just watching and enjoying.

"When you do that, the high scores come because" the judges "don’t have time to write down deductions."

Crater credits the 11 years she spent dancing, four of which were with a professional troop. With the Tidwell Project dance team, Crater performed all styles, from tap to jazz to ballet. While attending Parkview Arts and Science Magnet High School in Little Rock, Ark., Crater was a two-time captain of the cheerleading squad. She also had time to dabble in ice skating and beauty pageants - all the while honing the stage presence that glows each time she takes center stage.

Growing up, rarely did she sit idly.

"My mom said I was put into gymnastics because I annoyed the crap out of her at home," Crater said. "She said, ‘You’re hyper, so we need to find something for you to do so when you get home, you pass out.’ "

Lately, Crater hones her focus on the vault and floor. She’ll perform both tonight when No. 18 Missouri hosts the Big 12 Championships at the Hearnes Center.

Last week, in her home state, Crater won her first title of the season, matching her career-high 9.900 on the vault in Fayetteville, Ark. - a feat more impressive considering Tuesday’s one-year anniversary.

Last April 3, Crater was practicing her floor routine, making the last pass before her final flip. Then it snapped. The Achilles’ tendon on her right leg was no more. She doesn’t recall any pain, no popping noise. In fact, Crater didn’t think anything was wrong.

"Then I tried to stand up and walk," she said. "But I fell."

The tendon that connects Crater’s calf muscle to her heel bone was shredded. There was no pain because the nerves around the tendon were severed, too. Crater and her teammates were leaving the next day for Athens, Ga., site of the NCAA Southeast Regional meet.

Relegated to cheerleading duty with her leg in a cast, Crater knew her season was over.

"It’s a devastating injury, and it ends careers for some gymnasts," Drass said.

Crater’s mom, Renee, had already purchased a flight to Georgia when she got the news. Renee, a physical therapist in Little Rock, arrived in Athens and found her daughter in good spirits.

"She was disappointed, obviously, but wasn’t down and depressed as some probably could get," Renee said in a phone interview.

Crater had survived worse, her mom recalls thinking. When Crater was 13, her dad, A.C. Crater, died after a yearlong fight with cancer. A few years later, she missed an entire season because of a stress fracture in her shin.

"You either get tough or you buckle," Renee said. "She’s not one to buckle."

Team doctors told Crater she’d probably miss the first five or six meets of the 2007 season. After surgery on April 11, Crater was out of her walking boot and rehabbing rigorously four months later.

"This was her senior year," Renee said. "She had to come back."

Renee sometimes urged Crater to be patient with her rehab, fearing she’d build up too much scar tissue around the injury. Crater relented but remained a few weeks ahead of schedule as the season loomed.

She can’t practice every day, but she’s been in the vault lineup in every meet. She’s performed on the floor the last eight meets.

"She has good days and bad days in the gym, but we haven’t seen a bad day yet in competition," Drass said. "That’s really important that she has that mental mind-set that allows her, even if she doesn’t have a perfect practice, to still go out and have the best meet that she can."

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