Catching Up With ...
        Father-son soccer duo Mark and Jeffrey Collings (June 17)
        Track record holder and longtime SPU leader John Glancy (June 24)
        U.S.Olympic Track Trials competitor Jessica Pixler Tebo (July 1)


By MARK MOSCHETTI
Seattle Pacific Sports Information

SEATTLE – The team is the thing.
 
Kathie Cradduck didn't really know that until she came to Seattle Pacific.
 
But now, the former gymnastics star, who helped the Falcons win the 1992 national championship and was a nine-time All-American, preaches the team concept every hour of every day as head coach of the Washington state powerhouse Woodinville High School squad.
 
"The focus is that everybody is important, everyone has to work hard," said Cradduck (now Kathie Koch). "You never know when you're going to get called up."

 

Those Falcons – Woodinville is also known by that mascot – have gotten her message loud and clear. Not only did they win their third straight state title in February (the last two of those with Koch in charge), they beat the old state record by nearly two points, checking in with 187.375.
 
Koch wasn't surprised that they eclipsed the Class 4A (large school) standard of 185.45, set in 1993 by Sehome of Bellingham during the final year of its two-decade state dominance.
 
But she also knew better than to count on it until it actually happened.
 
"I knew they had the potential to break the state record – but I didn't tell them that from the get-go," she said. "We started competing, and we were putting some good scores together in early meets.
 
"We knew it was going to take everyone working together and hitting our routines. But it was on our radar."
 
GETTING SPU ON HER RADAR
For Koch, going back to Woodinville two years ago marked a return to her roots.
 
She graduated from there in 1989, although she never actually donned a school leotard. During those years, Koch focused her considerable talent at the club level with the Northwest Aerials of Kirkland. Like all top-notch club competitors, her goal was to prepare herself for a college gymnastics career.
 
Koch didn't have to look far to find it at Seattle Pacific.

 

"It was a small-school setting, and they had such a long-standing great gymnastics program," she said. "I came on a trip there, I loved the school and had a blast with the kids.
 
"It had everything I needed and wanted."
 
Laurel Tindall, then in the 14th year of her SPU head coaching reign that now has stretched to 41 years, was pleased to have her come aboard, although she essentially was a walk-on.
 
"She was a local kid, so I had seen her come up through the ranks for a number of years," she said. "She was pretty strong on every event. She was flexible, strong, and very well-rounded."
 
Koch started making an impact right away. Not only did she help the Falcons snare the third-place team trophy at the 1990 US Gymnastics Federation meet in Colorado Springs, she qualified for the individual finals on the uneven parallel bars during that freshman season and tied for fourth place.
 
"She was definitely a hard worker," Tindall said. "She came in every day and she got her stuff done."
 
GYMNASTICS AS SHE'D NEVER KNOWN IT
From the moment she first officially set foot into Tindall's gym as a college athlete, Koch knew something was different.
 
"My first experience with the team aspect was with SPU," she said. "With Laurel's direction and the team captains, I kind of learned the team mentality here."

 

By her own acknowledgement, that learning curve was sometimes a bit steep.
 
"It's a transition, especially freshman year," Koch said. "It took some time. But by the end of the year, once we got into the postseason, it's not about you. It's about everybody."
 
Helping her athletes make that transition is something Tindall does year after year.
 
"They're almost all in that situation," she said "Sometimes, that's hard to adjust to and hard to learn that you're competing against your teammates for a space (in the lineup)."
 
But Koch did learn it, and continued to shine. As a sophomore, she and senior Shawna Van Haveren had the highest vault score on the team at 9.6, and Koch placed an All-American fourth on the vault at nationals. Seattle Pacific finished second as a team, trailing only Southeast Missouri State.
 
Then as a junior, everything fell into place. Koch tied for the national all-round crown with 37.60 points – SPU's first-ever all-around titlist. She also was sixth on the vault, and eighth on the floor exercise. But even better than that: The Falcons won the team championship, racking up 185.85 points to edge out perennial power Texas Woman's University, which totaled 185.200.
 
"We had gone into that meet, and we were down one of our better kids (Corine Frohm), who was hurt," Koch recalled. "Some of our other kids had to step up. There was a little bit of doubt within ourselves. But we went out and gave it our all."
 
Koch concluded her career in 1993 with the last four of her nine All-American awards, placing second all-around at nationals (her 38.00 total was four-tenths higher than her winning score from the previous year), fourth on the vault and bars, and fifth on the beam, as the Falcons took third as a team.
 
STILL A FALCON – BUT NOW IN BLUE AND GREEN
That was the end of her competitive career, although Koch did some coaching afterward before starting her family.
 
Two years ago, the head and assistant coaching jobs at Woodinville came open. With her three children now older – 21, 16 and 10, none of them involved in gymnastics – Koch's interest was piqued.
 
"I hemmed and hawed about it," she said. "I asked my husband, and he said, 'I think you should do it.'
 
"So I jumped in with two feet."
 
This was no rebuilding project, or trying to take a middle-of-the-pack team to the next level. Woodinville had reclaimed the Class 4A state title in 2014, its first since a string of four straight from 2007-10, and back-to-back second-place finishes in 2012 and 2013.
 
During the 2014-15 season, Koch's first at the helm, the Falcons won again, this time by nearly 13 points ahead of Puyallup's Emerald Ridge. That was the second-largest margin of victory since the state adopted its current scoring system in 1987. (Sehome won by 17.2 points in 1990).
 
Then came this past February's record-scoring performance as Woodinville beat Kingco rival Newport of Bellevue by 14.15 points. Falcon gymnasts went 1-2-3 all-around, 1-2-3-4 on the beam, 1-2-3 on the floor, 1-2 on the bars, and 2-3 on the vault.
 
"Once we got to postseason, we had a long talk about how if everyone could find one-tenth of a mistake to fix," Koch said. "During practice, we'd always say, 'Where's that one-tenth before you go?'
 
"We work hard on our team dynamic," she added. "The one thing Laurel really impressed upon me is a lot of teams have a good No. 1 and No. 2 – but that's not what wins meets. What wins meets is your No. 4 and No. 5."
 
RIGHT FIT, IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE
For Koch, who majored in social science and elementary education at SPU and now teaches fifth grade at Sunrise Elementary in Redmond ("That's my favorite – just the age of the kids, and they're starting to figure out who they are and taking responsibility for their own work"), the high school season blends perfectly with her work and home lives.
 
"From November to February, it's all on. But it's not like the full year-round things," she said.
 
Though she's now coaching instead of competing, Koch is getting to enjoy the high school gymnastics atmosphere that was not part of her own teen years.
 
"I really love this age group of kids. These girls work well together," she said. "It's over so quick. Most of these kids probably aren't going on to the college level of gymnastics, so this is going to be it. It's about enjoying their time and make sure they have no regrets."
 
That includes on and off the mats.
 
"It has been great helping them, not only with gymnastics, but with things that transcend gymnastics," Koch said. "It's fun watching them grow as people."
 
And watching them succeed …
 
… as a team.