10 May New Gym, New Confidence – Joscelyn Roberson is Ready to be a Major Player for Team USA
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New Gym, New Confidence – Joscelyn Roberson is Ready to be a Major Player for Team USA
By Ashlee Buhler
The journey hasn’t always been easy for Joscelyn Roberson, but with a gym switch last September and two successful international assignments under her belt so far in 2023, her confidence is at an all time high.
A little over a week after returning home from Cairo, where she added two more golds and one silver to her medal collection (which includes two gold and a silver from DTB Pokal earlier this year) Roberson spoke candidly with the press about the struggles she has overcome to get to where she is now.
In September 2022, just weeks after her first senior U.S. Championship, Roberson made the move to Spring, Texas to train at World Champions Centre. One of the immediate impacts would be having a group of Elite gymnasts to train with.
“Being in Texarkana by myself, the only Elite – the next level was a Level 9, so it was hard for anybody to understand what I was doing and what I was going through,” Roberson said. “When I moved here, I had five or six girls going through the exact same thing… It’s really good to have somebody to lean on when you’re having a hard day because they know what you’re going through and they can understand it.”
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The move has also done wonders for her mental health and confidence. Roberson admits that she used to have a lot of fear, particularly on bars and floor.
“Before I used to be so scared of everything, especially on floor and bars,” Roberson said. “But now Laurent really broke it down in a way where it wasn’t as scary for me anymore and I got to get past those boundaries that were keeping me back for so long.”
One of the biggest boundaries? The twisties. It’s a term the outside world became familiar with when Simone Biles withdrew from several finals at the Tokyo Olympics. Roberson has struggled with the same mental block throughout her career. The first time she struggled with a case of the twisties was when she was eight years-old. It’s been an on and off battle – the worst of the struggle coming right before the 2019 U.S. Classic. Being able to confide in Biles (“It made me feel like I wasn’t the only one that got the twisties,” she said.) as well as having her coaches break down her skills in a way that felt less daunting, has helped Roberson do things she once thought was impossible.
Prior to moving to WCC, Roberson had never done a full-in on floor. She tried a double double three times but would always wind up doing a double full instead. She gave up on trying the skill for the longest time.
“A big mental boost for me was getting over the mental block with the double double,” Roberson said. “It had been a mental block for years and years and I never thought I would ever do it, so it really weighed me down even though I was never doing it in competition. When I would go to practice and they would even mention me doing a double double, it would destroy my whole day because I was so scared of it.”
But now Roberson performs the skill with ease – debuting the skill for the first time in competition at the 2023 Winter Cup.The original plan was to debut it later this year at the U.S. Championships, but with a little bit of belief from her coach Laurent Landi, Roberson ended up warming up the laid out double double in podium training and going for it in competition.
It had only been seven months since she gave the skill a try in the gym. Now it’s how she opens her jam-packed floor routine. “I never thought in a million years I would ever compete that,” Roberson said. “It’s really a wild world.”
The move to WCC has also helped improve her bar work – the event that historically has been Roberson’s weakest. It’s still a work in progress, but Roberson is happy with the improvements she has made. In training these days she can not hit three bar routines in a row – something she said she couldn’t have imagined herself doing a year ago – but she is working on perfecting the details.
“We definitely spend more time on basics and more detailed work than I did at my other gym,” she said. “At my other gym we were just trying to make a bar routine. Here we want to perfect a bar routine.”
With a newfound confidence and upgraded routines, Roberson is now thriving on the international stage. Prior to 2023, her only international assignment was as an alternate to the Junior Pan Am Championship team in 2021. While Roberson said it was great to be able to enjoy the experience without the added pressure of competing, deep down it was hard to be doing so well but not have the opportunity to march into the arena donning red, white and blue.
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Now she’s seizing every opportunity that comes her way. First came the DTB Pokal meet in Germany, where Roberson helped Team USA (Nola Matthews, Zoe Miller, Ashlee Sullivan & Lexi Zeiss) win the gold medal, while also bringing home gold on vault and silver on floor. Roberson said the nerves were non-existent. She had been waiting a long time for this moment. She was ready for it.
“When I finally got to do it (compete in Germany) I wasn’t nervous at all,” Roberson said. “I was so excited the whole time. Plus having a team – I was never nervous because I wasn’t doing it for myself. I was doing it for them and for the team.”
Then it was off to Cairo for her first World Cup, where she was competing against gymnasts from all walks of life – something she said she has enjoyed. Among the gymnasts in Cairo was eight-time Olympian Oksana Chusovitina.
“I actually saw her for the first time at podium training and I was in awe of her,” Roberson said. “I didn’t want to go up and say hi. I was like, ‘she’s such an icon.’ Then for vault finals obviously we were in the same group and we got to talking. She’s really so sweet … At the end Cecile (Landi) was like, ‘We have to get a picture!’ because I was too scared to ask for one! She’s really the sweetest human.”
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I saw this 📸 was requested by many 🤗 @Josc_Roberson pic.twitter.com/QiC7t7wwgu
— Cecile Landi (@CLcecile) April 30, 2023
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Roberson ended up leaving Cairo with three more medals to add to her haul – gold on vault and floor as well as silver on beam. But she’s really only just getting started.
On the way home, Roberson found out she would be headed to Colombia in just a few weeks (May 22-29) for the Pan American Championships – the same competition where she was an alternate just two years ago. Now she has not only locked her spot on the team, but has a real shot at bringing home some hardware. Being in that position feels like a dream come true, Roberson said.
“This has always been my dream to do this sort of stuff, so being able to do it and having the experience of going all over the world has been really fun,” Roberson said.
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Following the Pan American Championships, Roberson plans to slow down her training – maybe work a few upgrades – before going full steam for the U.S. Classic and U.S. Championships this summer. Then she will shift her focus on the World Championships in Antwerp later this year.
Where Roberson fits the puzzle remains to be seen but if one thing is certain, Roberson is a completely different gymnast than we saw a year ago. Her growing confidence is not only evident on the competition floor, but when fielding questions from the media.
“I want you guys to know me and I want you guys to like me for who I am and not some other persona that I put on,” she said.
She’s poised, she’s confident, she’s herself, and she’s ready to be a major player for Team USA.
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Photos by Lloyd Smith and Evan Manivong for Inside Gymnastics
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