The 9/11 victim who saved gymnasts across America

JENNIFER BANNON RECALLS the emotions more than the specifics when she thinks about her last summer in college. It's been 25 years. She was a gymnast at UC Santa Barbara and was working an internship in Washington, D.C. Back on campus, a crisis began to brew. Her coach had resigned and the school was searching for a replacement. As the lone returning senior, and a captain, Bannon helped review résumés. She stopped when she came across a familiar name: Mari-Rae Sopper. "I recognized her because she coached a lot of my friends -- girls that I went to high school with," Bannon says. "I just remember, 'Oh, I know this woman. She's so great.'" At the time, Sopper wasn't feeling so great. She was living in D.C. and had just resigned from her job as a corporate attorney. The former Iowa State gymnast sent what was certainly the most eclectic résumé -- it included a stint in the Navy JAG Corps -- to UCSB. The women waited and reconnected until unexpected news came from California. The athletic department announced it was cutting the program entirely and immediately. Sopper had yet to be hired, but Bannon turned to her for ideas on how to save the program. "She was so small but fierce," Bannon says. "All I could think about was, 'Man, I don't want to be on your bad side.' Because she's a bulldog. She is a bulldog." A three-day blitz from Bannon and Sopper convinced the school to grant the program one more year and to name Sopper head coach. She reached out to the gymnasts and formulated a strategy to not only save the program beyond 2001-02, but to make the Gauchos a national contender. In the waning days of summer, Bannon and Sopper sat in a restaurant and made plans to fly back to California together on Sept. 11, 2001. "The last thing we talked about was she showed me the conditioning that she was going to have us do for the first week," Bannon says, recalling massive numbers of push-ups, mountain climbers and pull-ups. She moved up her travel plans by a week to get a head start on the workouts and flew home solo. "I always [look back] and say, 'I think that conditioning sheet saved my life.'" ON THE MORNING of Sept. 11, Mari-Rae Sopper boarded American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles International Airport with her orange tabby named Sammy, chasing a dream of coaching college gymnastics. Loose snapshots of her life, and death, pop up sometimes in September when vignettes of the 2,977 lives lost on 9/11 appear on social media. They tell a story of a 35-year-old attorney who gave up a high-paying corporate lawyer job to coach at UCSB, taking a roughly 70% pay cut, and died on the way to her dream when her plane was taken over by hijackers and intentionally crashed into the Pentagon. Sometimes videos are posted of Sopper carrying her cat through security while two of the hijackers wait in line behind her. The narrative isn't entirely accurate. Sopper actually quit that corporate job earlier in the summer because she hated it, because she loved representing the underdog and never got comfortable being the big entity doing the squashing. She left because gymnastics was her true love. Five days after that much-anticipated flight to California, friends and family packed into the Fremd High School gym in Palatine, Illinois, to say goodbye. Jim Bailey, one of a handful of friends to eulogize Sopper, told mourners that he met her at a costume party -- she dressed up like a cow; he was a fighter pilot. They ate sushi together and saw movies that Bailey didn't necessarily want to see but often wound up liking. Bailey was the one generally tasked with taking her to the airport, and before that last ride, he contemplated mentioning the merits of the D.C. taxi service. But like so many others, he couldn't say no to Mari-Rae. Her purse that morning was the size of a duffel bag, and her cat was making a mess in her condo because he was sick from a relaxant. Bailey helped her coax Sammy into his carrier. The drive to Dulles Airport was picturesque on a sun-splashed morning. When Bailey dropped her off, she stopped and looked at him for a moment. "Jim," she told him, "I don't have any ones." It wasn't profound, but captured Sopper's mindset. He said she was so excited the night before that she couldn't sleep. She was ready to get to Santa Barbara and go to work. Bailey tipped the baggage handler, gave Sopper a hug and a kiss, and got in the car. "Call me when you get to Santa Barbara," he told her. In life, Sopper dreamed of saving a seemingly hopeless college gymnastics program. She had no idea that in death, she'd impact so many others. SHE WAS DESTINED to be a coach. In 1981, Fremd High hired Larry Petrillo to turn around a struggling program, and his biggest critic was a sophomore gymnast. Sopper gave him lineup suggestions. When Petrillo told the team his optimistic expectations of a possible state bid in three years, Sopper corrected him. "No," she said. "We'll make it to state this year. Next year, we'll trophy. And the year after that, we're going to win it." Her mother, Marion Kminek, says Sopper fell in love with the sport as a little girl when Nadia Comaneci became the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 at the 1976 Olympics. Sopper also strived for perfection, and spent hours coming up with strategies for practice. She did much of the choreography for her teammates' floor routines and tried to bring them along the best she could. But sometimes, Petrillo says, her intensity could be a bit much. He thought her predictions seemed unrealistic. Fremd had never been to state in school history. "I thought, 'OK, she's a sophomore in high school,'" he says, "What does she know?" With Sopper constantly pushing her teammates, and herself, Fremd won districts her sophomore year and finished second in state the next. Senior year, the Vikings had an early lead at state but fell short of the title. The next two seasons, behind Sopper's younger sister Tammy, Fremd won back-to-back state championships. "Tammy was a natural," Petrillo says. "Tammy spent a quarter of the time preparing and she was better than Mari-Rae was." Petrillo, who eventually forged a deep appreciation for Mari-Rae Sopper, says she was committed to gymnastics her whole life. "She loved being out there for the world to see." Sopper walked on at Iowa State in the fall of 1984 and didn't let up. She had a good sense of humor, says former Cyclones standout Julie Sullivan, but didn't like to tell jokes in the gym. She worked hard, studied hard, and, since her relationships with her boyfriends were usually intense, her breakups were hard. "She was very much a true north kind of friend," Sullivan says. "That one friend who will be like, 'Yes, you look bad in that dress' or 'Yes, you need to leave your husband.'" Sopper went on to be Iowa State's Most Valuable Gymnast senior year. She knew she'd need her master's degree to become a college head coach, so she went to the University of North Texas. But jobs were scarce. "When she graduated college and gymnastics was no longer a thing," her sister, Tammy Sopper Segovia, says, "she would always go to all the different events. She was still a part of that community. I think that had to be really hard on her." With nowhere to use her master's degree in athletic administration, and no job that rewarded her zeal for the sport, she went to law school in Denver. Her father, Bill, had wanted her to be a lawyer. She satisfied her coaching itch, somewhat, by serving as a grad assistant at the University of Denver for a year and choreographing floor routines for young gymnasts. That's how Jennifer Bannon met Sopper, who coached some of her high school friends. When Sopper landed at the Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps, people close to her found it an unusual fit. Sopper wasn't good at being a follower. She didn't like the Navy's dress code, particularly its stance on skirts, which were to fall to the middle of the calves. She didn't find it flattering, so she had her skirts hemmed just below the knees. "She did what she wanted," Sopper Segovia says. She had a massive case load, but always worked tirelessly for the underdog. "She [would] come home for Christmas or Easter," Sopper Segovia says, "and we're all at the dinner table and she's talking and she's so certain that they're all innocent ... She just really believed all of them." Sopper juggled her time mentoring at-risk youth in the area and helping the coaching staffs at George Washington University and the U.S. Naval Academy women's gymnastics club team. When her time at the JAG Corps ended, corporate law seemed like the next natural step. The money was great, but the hours consumed her. "She absolutely hated everything about it," her sister says. "Hated what it stood for. And gymnastics was so much a part of her identity. It was really hard for her not to be involved with it." Still, Sopper Segovia was stunned when her sister resigned. "I thought she was nuts," she says. "I'm like, 'Why are you doing this?'" ELITE GYMNASTS WHO GREW UP in the 1990s, Cara Koch says, sometimes spent 40 hours a week in a gym as grade schoolers and sacrificed many of the rituals of childhood. Earning a college scholarship, Koch says, was her last hurrah. She planned to enjoy her time at UCSB. All that ended when she was a junior in the summer of 2001. Koch grabbed her Nokia flip phone to retrieve a voicemail. She says it was from the athletic director's secretary informing her that the gymnastics program was being terminated immediately. Her scholarship would be honored for a year, but Koch and her teammates were blindsided. They had no time to transfer. Back in D.C., Sopper and Bannon brainstormed ways to save the program. Bannon said she had multiple conversations with athletic department officials and told them they couldn't cut a program for a group of athletes with such a short window of competition and no time to transfer with practice weeks away. A spokesperson for USCB told ESPN via email that the athletic department no longer has anyone in the department who was around in 2001 during the gymnastics cuts. Days after the program was discontinued, the administration restored both the women's and men's programs, according to The Associated Press. UCSB hired Sopper roughly two weeks later. It still planned to terminate the program the following year unless the program could raise $4 million to stay afloat. Sopper immediately went to work. She learned everything she could about each of her new gymnasts, and started putting together workout schedules and fundraising plans. Talia Upchurch, who was an incoming junior at UCSB in the summer of 2001, was encouraged by her diligence. "She called each one of us on the phone, every single teammate on the phone," Upchurch says, "and said, 'I'm going to save your program.' I'll never forget that phone call because it meant so much to me." SOPPER PLANNED TO DRIVE to Santa Barbara at first, but her mom told her flying would be safer. On Sept. 3, she wrote an email to her friends and family with the subject line, "new city, new state, new job . . ." She apologized for not being in touch sooner, and said the past two weeks had been "a bit crazy." She included her new office number with a Santa Barbara area code, effective Sept. 11. She signed the note. Mari-Rae Sopper Head Women's Gymnastics Coach University of California-Santa Barbara She called her old high school coach a few days before her flight, and Petrillo heard a different tone in her voice that reminded him of her days back in high school. She once again plotted plans that seemed unrealistic. But this time, Petrillo wasn't the least bit skeptical. On Sept. 11, Petrillo was in the social studies office at Fremd High School watching in horror as the Twin Towers fell. He turned to his department chair. "You know," he said, "this is going to touch somebody at this school." Then Petrillo heard the news. Mari-Rae Sopper was dead. Back in California, Bannon watched the news and waited to hear from Sopper. Bannon had agreed to take care of Sammy while Sopper got settled and was on call for a tabby pickup. When her phone finally rang, it was Alice Henry, UCSB's senior women's athletic director. "I remember this really vividly," Bannon says. "She goes, 'I'm so sorry, kiddo.' And then my heart just sank, and I'm like, 'Oh my God.' I knew exactly what she meant instantly." The team barbecue scheduled for that Sunday was canceled. Weeks worth of optimism evaporated. UCSB dedicated the season to Sopper, and tried to compete the best they could. Sopper's family started a memorial fund in the hopes of raising enough money to keep the program going. It wasn't nearly enough to reach the athletic department's goal. "We didn't have the hope of really saving the program because she was our person," Upchurch says. "After that, they just kind of gave up. The athletic department just kind of gave up after that happened." Koch, who was rehabbing from shoulder surgery, showed up for practice one day. A new assistant coach -- who happened be her old UCSB teammate -- told her that she wouldn't suit up or compete that season because she didn't think Koch would recover in time. "...The uniforms had been ordered but not one for me," the junior captain said. "And that was it. My 18-year gymnastics career was over." She wrote a letter to her teammates encouraging them to enjoy their final season. Bannon says it was a "very challenging" season, with young coaches scrambling to lead a team fully aware of its looming expiration date. Bannon couldn't help but think of Sopper's family, and all their efforts with the fund. She couldn't stop thinking of Mari-Rae. Bannon says she emptied her bank account and her frequent-flier miles to fly Sopper's family out for the final meet of the season. She convinced a hotel in downtown Santa Barbara to give the family a free room. "I felt like Mari-Rae was there," Bannon says, crying. "I knew how much it meant for her parents, her mom and her stepdad, to be there, where they could just see Mari-Rae being a part of gymnastics. And yeah, it was wonderful." IN 2012, THE PLATTSBURGH High School gymnastics team in New York faced elimination because of budget cuts. Janice Trudeau, the longtime coach at Plattsburgh who also runs a gym in the northeastern fringes of upstate New York, knew if Plattsburgh's program was eliminated, the other two teams in their conference would likely be axed, too. So the rival schools, Plattsburgh, Peru and Beekmantown, banded together to fundraise that summer. They set up tables with tip jars outside Walmart and did somersaults and handsprings for donations. Trudeau recalls that someone at the store told them they needed to sell something to solicit funds, so they made cheap buttons that said, "I Support HS Gymnastics." But it wasn't enough. Bob Bunnell, who ran the booster club, reached out to Marion Kminek. He'd heard about the Mari-Rae Sopper Gymnastics Memorial Fund, and was desperate. After a brief conversation, Sopper's mom wrote a check for $6,223.57 -- all the money left in the 11-year-old charity. The fund had helped MIT gymnastics and the Palatine park district where a young Mari-Rae used to plot her future. It provided funds for USA Gymnastics and for a Chicago art center for at-risk children. And it provided enough money for Plattsburgh to compete in the 2012-13 season. It allowed children such as Allie Timmons, who was in sixth grade at the time, the chance to compete for Peru High gymnastics. Less than a year later, Bunnell wrote Kminek an email with an exclamation mark in the header. "Thanks for saving HS Gymnastics!" For at least five years, the programs for the teams' sectionals featured a black-and-white photo of a young woman with impeccably combed bangs on a balance beam. It told a brief story about Mari-Rae Sopper, the woman who couldn't save UCSB's program, but helped salvage theirs. "She helped keep our program together, and she was a gymnast," says Timmons, who was 6 months old when Sopper died on 9/11. "I just remember hearing her story, and I don't think I will ever forget." Timmons didn't like high school much, and gymnastics, she says, saved her. She qualified for state multiple times, and recently, she started coaching at Janice Trudeau's gym. She hopes to eventually take over for Trudeau. Bannon never planned to make a career out of gymnastics the way Timmons and Sopper did. Her body was breaking down and she considered calling it quits. But then she reconnected with Sopper that summer in D.C. "This woman -- I couldn't imagine not doing one more year and having the pleasure of working with her," Bannon says. "She was such an inspiration to me." One day in the final stretch of summer, just before flying to California in that first week of September, Bannon visited the FBI museum. She was enthralled with the tour and envisioned a future with the bureau. When Sopper died, Bannon made up her mind. Today, she's an agent in the FBI's Los Angeles field office. "After 9/11, I just said, 'There's no other path,'" Bannon says. "There's no other option. This is what I'm doing."