ONE YEAR AGO, Helen Hu was in the small beach town of Las Tunas, Ecuador, living and working at a hostel alongside her sister and spending her free time learning to surf.
She was some 300 miles away from Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, and 2,800 miles from her previous life in Columbia, Missouri. Hu’s celebrated college gymnastics career, in which she had earned multiple All-American and SEC honors, was firmly behind her. She was now focused on the waves in front of her and the infinite possibilities about her future on the horizon.
She had no idea that one year later, she would be the No. 2-ranked beam performer in the nation and the SEC champion on that event. And that Hu and the No. 7 Tigers would be gearing up for regional competition in Seattle on April 4 — with their eyes on securing just the third NCAA championships berth in program history.
“If someone had told me last year I would be back on the team, I probably would have laughed in their face,” Hu, 23, told ESPN last week. “I was done, I was happy with my life. I had accomplished enough and closed that chapter. I missed it, but not in a ‘I wish I could go back’ kind of way. I had moved on… But now, I’m here and my motto all season has just been to have fun.
“I’m just in such a better place [than I was] to just have the most amount of fun with it now and actually enjoy my senior season in a way I couldn’t the first time around.”
HU’S STAY IN Ecuador was part of an 11-month backpacking trip around the world with her older sister Elaine. The two had started dreaming about the idea during the lockdown of the 2020 pandemic and had revisited it throughout the next three years.
When it was clear Hu would not be returning for a redshirt senior year in 2024 due to persistent back pain, the two decided to actually do it and mapped out a journey around the globe. Elaine quit her job and the duo set out in July of 2023, two months after Hu’s graduation.
In addition to Ecuador, where they spent 10 weeks, the two made stops in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Italy, Finland and participated in a four-week yoga teacher training in India. Hu loved meeting other travelers, experiencing new cultures and trying different food.
When she came back to the States in June of 2024, she was ready to start the next phase of her life and signed a lease for an apartment with her brother in their native Chicago. She planned to coach in her old gym for the rest of the summer.
Then a stop in Columbia to be a bridesmaid in her former teammate’s Adalayna Hufendiek’s wedding changed everything.
During the trip to Missouri, Hu stayed with Jocelyn Moore, now a senior on the team, and decided to tag along with Moore to the gym one day for a summer training session. She had planned to mostly observe, stretch and catch up with some of her old teammates. But she couldn’t resist seeing what she could still do. It had been nearly 15 months since she had been on a beam.
“I hopped on and was like, ‘Hey, I still have an aerial,'” Hu said. “And then I thought, ‘Let me see if I can do two in a row.’ And I did it.”
Moore said everyone in the gym couldn’t help but watch in awe.
“If your body hasn’t done gymnastics in a year, it’s really hard to come back, but for Helen, it wasn’t a challenge at all,” Moore told ESPN. “We all kind of laughed because we were like, ‘This isn’t real.’ But it was real and it was Helen Hu.”
It was then head coach Shannon Welker came over and reminded Hu she had another year of eligibility remaining. Because he said it offhandedly, Hu assumed he was kidding.
But Welker wasn’t joking. And 30 minutes later, he mentioned it again, and told Hu they had a spot for her on the 2025 roster if she wanted it.
“Helen hopped up on the beam and started doing skills like no time had elapsed since the last time she was in here,” Welker told ESPN. “That was really exciting to see and in my mind, I’m like, ‘Man, so good. [But] like, what are we doing here?’ We’ve got to put this to some productive use.”
He recruited Moore to help him convince Hu to return, and the two continued to talk about it over the next few days. Hu even brought it up to Hufendiek as they got ready for her wedding (Hufendiek was all for it and said it would be the “coolest, most iconic thing ever.”) By the end of Hu’s week in Columbia, she was convinced, and moved by how much everyone wanted her to be a part of the team again.
“Shannon had brought it up initially on a Monday, and by Saturday evening, I was like, ‘I actually want to do this,'” Hu said. “It was at first so hard to fathom doing it because in my brain I had fully shut the door, I had said goodbye to gymnastics. But once I let those doors open in my mind, I could actually do it. Then my love of gymnastics kicked in and I realized what a cool opportunity it was and it was impossible to turn down.”
Welker got to work in determining what needed to be done in terms of compliance with the NCAA, and Hu returned to Chicago and began training — in addition to coaching — in her old gym. She was officially a gymnast again.
HU’S FIRST COLLEGIATE gymnastics era had been a memorable one, and she became known for her artistry, unique skills and flexibility, especially on beam.
During her freshman season, in which she competed all four events in six meets, she was the SEC’s Event Specialist of the Year and named to the All-SEC team and the conference’s Freshman team, in addition to earning first team All-American honors on beam and second team All-American on bars. She was sidelined the entirety of her sophomore campaign with injury but returned the following year and focused solely on bars and beam. The Tigers made it to the NCAA championships that season for the second time — just narrowly missing out on advancing to the title meet on Saturday — and Hu was named a postseason All-American on beam and again to the All-SEC team.
During her senior season in 2023, she struggled with frequent and debilitating pain from spondylolysis, a type of stress fracture, in her lower back. While some days were less painful than others, she knew she would be “miserable” if she stayed for her redshirt senior year and made the difficult decision early in the season that it was her final one. She competed on beam and bars in all 13 of the team’s meets and matched her career-high scores of 9.975 on beam and 9.95 on bars.
But her second chapter as a Missouri gymnast? That’s been nothing short of extraordinary.
Hu had two conditions for her return. The first was that she was able to remain in Chicago for the first semester of the academic year to continue training and coaching at her former club gym. The second was that she would compete only on beam. She loved bars but knew it was the swinging that was causing her the most back pain.
Welker agreed to both.
Hu made as many trips as allowed by the NCAA to Columbia during the fall semester in order to get to know her teammates and see how the team was shaping up. During her first visit in October, Hu studied the team roster on the plane in order to learn the names of the new members.
“They all knew my name but I didn’t know half of their names,” Hu said. “It was so nerve-wracking; I didn’t want to mess up and call someone the wrong name. Even when we were all cheering everyone on at practice, I would have to wait for other people to start cheering just to make sure I wouldn’t yell the wrong name.”
Hu began working by herself, often during quiet hours at the gym in Chicago when no one else was around, on her beam routine. She would send videos to assistant coach Lacey Rubin, who started working with the Tigers after Hu had left in 2023, and ask her old club coach for advice and input. After struggling to perfect her previous dismount, a gainer full, she learned a new one by herself.
“We came up with this idea to try the gainer pike dismount instead, which was intimidating because I haven’t learned a new beam skill in a lot of years,” Hu said. “It was a new challenge for me.”
Hu spoke to Welker every week about her conditioning and what they were working on in practice, and she would frequently text or email with questions or points of concern.
By the time she officially arrived back on campus in December, she felt comfortable and had a nearly complete beam routine. And her presence and veteran leadership was immediately felt.
“To have somebody like that on your team that wants to come back to the University of Missouri and give it their all, even though they don’t have to, I think that is really inspirational for [the rest of the team],” Welker said. “To have someone like Helen that’s just cool and calm and just an incredible competitor really [adds] a lot of confidence to our team.”
Hu didn’t have many expectations for herself but was feeling good about her abilities and her level. She thought she would receive “some 9.95s on a good day, and maybe a 9.975 on a really good day,” but didn’t want to focus on her scores. She simply wanted to have fun in her victory lap.
But in the third meet of the season, against top-ranked Oklahoma in Norman, Hu did something she thought might never happen: She scored a perfect 10.0. In a routine called “a work of art” on the TV broadcast by analyst and former NCAA champion Bridget Sloan, Hu stuck her gainer pike dismount. Her teammates jumped in around her, embracing her and chanting for a ten. It took Hu a moment to comprehend what was happening when the score appeared.
“I just was in complete shock,” Hu said. “My knees buckled a little bit and I started crying, and I’m not an easily emotional person, but I was just so shocked that it was happening and I was so grateful. I mean being surrounded by my team like that, and they’re all huddling and they’re hugging me and they’re screaming, I was just crying. There were no coherent brain thoughts happening in that moment to be honest. I was just like, ‘Oh my god, it’s happening.’ And I was trying to process that this was reality, that this was real life.”
HELEN HU WITH ABSOLUTE PERFECTION ON BEAM 🤩🔟@espnW | @SECNetwork pic.twitter.com/WEHSPG8wE8
— ESPN (@espn) January 18, 2025
For Moore, who was in the huddle around Hu, the score was a long time coming.
“I was really sad when she graduated and left and hadn’t received that perfect 10.0 yet,” Moore said. “It was like, ‘That’s such a bummer because that’s a person who definitely, out of all the perfect 10.0s that have been given, she should have been one of them’ … She had worked so hard in those four years that she was here previously, so now to actually get the score that she deserved, it was so cool.”
Since then, Hu has received another 10.0 during the team’s final meet of the regular season against Arkansas, and became just the second gymnast in program history to achieve multiple perfect scores in the same season. It also earned Hu her fifth SEC Specialist of the Week honor of 2025.
And Missouri has steadily climbed throughout the season as well, with wins over the likes of conferences foes Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia, and the best score in school history, a 198.100, against Auburn on Senior Night. The Tigers qualified for the night session of the SEC championships, a long-time goal for the team, and one reserved for the top four squads in the highly competitive conference. Over the weekend, Missouri finished fourth as a team, and Hu won a share of the conference title on beam.
Hu is hopeful the team can make it to the national championships in Fort Worth, but she’s already achieved more than she dreamed in her final season. Knowing her gymnastics career is coming to a close — for real this time — she’s at peace with whatever the future holds.
“My first senior year was so bittersweet because it’s hard to say goodbye to the sport that you’ve loved so much, but having literally already done that two years ago, knowing what it’s like, it’s not bitter at all, just sweet,” Hu said. “I already know what this is like, and I know what’s on the other side, and I’m just so happy to be here.
“I didn’t feel sad to be competing in [the] Hearnes [Center] one last time or that we’re approaching the postseason. I mean that in the nicest way possible, I’m having a great time but I’m also totally ready for whenever this is over. This year really just feels like the cherry on top.”
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