OVERCOMING OBSTACLES From birth, gymnast Taylor Allex has risen above difficulties that many would deem impossible

For Taylor Allex and her family, the trials began before she had even taken her first breath.
Today, Taylor is a freshman on Utah’s gymnastics team. She was highly recruited by the who’s-who of NCAA gymnastics, including Alabama, Georgia and UCLA. But her athletic career came after some doctors said she might never enjoy the full use of her left arm.
Because of complications during birth, in which a doctor had to pull on her arm, Taylor was left with a condition called Erb’s Palsy that rendered her left arm completely paralyzed. Erb’s Palsy is caused when ligaments in the shoulder stretch and affect the nerves, which can cause varying degrees of paralysis.
Though some cases heal on their own, others require physical therapy or even surgery. Dominique Allex, Taylor’s mother, said she had worked with someone who dealt with a similar condition, and his arm never fully recovered.
Doctors initially tried to explain that it wasn’t a significant injury and that it would heal on its own, but Taylor’s mother knew that wasn’t the case. She consulted a separate pediatric neurologist who confirmed that, despite what the other doctors had said, Taylor would need physical therapy if there was any hope of restoring her ability to use her arm.
“[There was] a lot of crying,” Dominique Allex said. “A lot of disbelief and anger because I felt like these doctors ruined her … I shudder to think of what would have happened if I had just pinned it to her shirt like they said — it probably wouldn’t have healed properly.”
The Allex family knew they couldn’t just let Taylor’s arm go stagnant as there were plenty of signs that she would not regain function in the limb.
“My parents said that when I would lay down I could move one arm, but one arm would just lay on the ground,” Taylor said.
Thirteen months of physical therapy yielded major improvement. The arm that was completely paralyzed at birth was now moving and gaining strength. The therapist said Taylor had progressed and predicted that she would do “good things.”
But the Allex family wasn’t out of the woods. During the first few years of Taylor’s life, the family was warned about complications that could arise from things such picking her up by her arms or swinging her around. But things would happen, Taylor’s mother said. The child would sometimes walk up to her older brother holding her arms out, wanting to be picked up. Brandon Allex would oblige, sometimes pulling the arm out of its socket.
Such instances sent the family to the hospital on multiple occasions. The baby would cry as doctors put the arm back into place, which didn’t always happen on the first try. Times like these make it especially surprising that Taylor has been so successful with gymnastics, said her mother, who was herself a collegiate gymnast.
“I never thought about gymnastics that early,” Dominique Allex said. “We had to put that out of our heads.”
But eventually Taylor’s arm gained sufficient strength to make athletics an option. Her mother signed her up for gymnastics at around age nine, but Allex wanted to quit shortly thereafter. Her mother thought it had to do with Taylor not trusting the coach to catch her while practicing certain moves like back handsprings.
Dominique Allex describes her daughter as passionate, motivated and even stubborn because she refuses to give up on things she cares about. And that’s exactly how it was when Taylor decided she wanted to give gymnastics another shot at age 10.
Even though she started so much later than most of the girls she competed with, an innate talent allowed Taylor to excel. She began working with John Tobler, a gymnastics coach who helped to “fast-track” her, and watched video of other girls in order to work on her technique.
Over the summers, Taylor trained 8-10 hours every day at different facilities, working on different techniques. As long as she wanted to do it, her parents supported her, and it eventually paid off when she was offered scholarships to some of the best gymnastics programs in the nation.
But after getting to Utah, she was again faced with adversity. She hurt her back in the preseason, fracturing two vertebrae. Taylor was recruited as an all-arounder and wanted to be working toward that end, and admitted that being limited by injury was frustrating. But she didn’t let that get in her way and instead kept working her way back to being in competition form.
“I learned how to work through an injury, so there are a lot of good things that came from it,” Taylor said. “I’m a lot stronger now, but I did have to take like 20 steps back because I wasn’t allowed to fast walk or anything. I was just stuck in a back brace.”
After being forced to miss the season opener against UCLA, Taylor made her Ute debut on vault in the tri-meet against Southern Utah, West Virginia and Oregon State. She scored a 9.8 in that meet and has been a regular part of Utah’s vault team ever since.
The back injury has remained an issue throughout the season, and Taylor said there are good days and bad. But she has been training on all four events recently, and next year, she said, she is determined to compete in more than one event and hopes to be included as an all-arounder.
Sitting in the Dumke Gymnastics Center waiting for practice to start, she smiled as she talked about the arm injury that could have kept her from ever being a successful gymnast. She said she thinks it’s cool that she was able to get past such a major injury as a child, and even though she doesn’t think about it all the time, it is a source of pride for her.
“Now, that’s my strong arm,” she said.