This was terra incognita, territory Karilyn Burdick-Greenwood was charting for the first time. Territory that her gymnastics routines hadn’t prepared her for traversing. And yet, it was territory her gymnastics routines made possible.
This charting-the-uncharted-territory routine had become routine for Burdick-Greenwood. So routine, she’d grown rather accustomed to seeing her name preceding the phrase “the first …”
As in:
- Karilyn Burdick-Greenwood was the first Cal State Fullerton All-American women’s gymnast in program history.
- Karilyn Burdick-Greenwood was the first Cal State Fullerton national champion in women’s gymnastics.
- Karilyn Burdick-Greenwood was the first Cal State Fullerton women’s gymnast to compete in an international meet in Romania, where she won a bronze medal.
But Burdick-Greenwood didn’t have a week during the summer of 1979 — as the 21st-century snarkmeisters would call it — ”on her bingo card.” There wasn’t a gym, a vault or uneven bars in sight. She couldn’t hear any screaming crowds or Lynn Rogers’ motivating, yet reassuring, voice. The same voice Burdick-Greenwood first heard as a 14-year-old at the Lakewood Kips gymnastics club, doubling as the same voice that, in 1976, recruited Burdick-Greenwood to the year-old women’s gymnastics team at Cal State Fullerton.
No. Burdick-Greenwood found herself in New York during the summer of 1979 in rarefied company that, nearly 50 years later, still triggers the goosebumps. She calls it “the highlight of her college career.”
And yes, it was another first.
Burdick-Greenwood was named as one of Glamour Magazine’s “Top 10 College Women of the Year,” an honor that came with a week in New York replete with Broadway plays, trips to the opera and ballet, makeovers, meetings with Fortune 500 executives and, well, “just a whirlwind of a week,” as she remembered it.
Here. Burdick-Greenwood now found herself in the same company as a couple of previous winners named Martha Stewart and Diane Sawyer.
“I had to submit an essay and an application, and I remember sitting in the women’s gym at midnight, and a baseball player whose name I can’t remember helped me write my essay,” she remembered. “The other winners were from Dartmouth, West Point, Wellesley and schools like that. And here was Karilyn Burdick from Cal State Fullerton. Glamour told me at this point nobody had made a big mark in athletics, and that’s what captured their attention, and that’s how I got selected.”
Now, Burdick-Greenwood finds herself in more uncharted territory, where — for a change — she’s not the first. She’s the fourth women’s gymnast and fifth member of the program to enter the Cal State Fullerton Athletics Hall of Fame.
Burdick-Greenwood not only keeps company with previous women’s gymnastics inductees Rogers, Tami Elliott-Harrison, Carol Johnston and Barb Myslak-Roetert, but joins the 1977-78 Men’s Basketball Team, administrator Steve DiTolla, soccer player Becca Wilson and the late softball pitcher Taylor Dockins and late baseball coach Don Sneddon in this year’s class.
It was an honor not only long in coming, but one Burdick-Greenwood, by now, didn’t expect. She was in Nashville, visiting her son, daughter-in-law and grandson, when the call from CSUF Special Events Coordinator Spencer Crellin came. Because her screen only read “Cal,” Burdick-Greenwood disregarded the call, joking that she wondered why UC Berkeley was calling her.
“I’d been told by (former coach) Lynn Rogers that I was nominated many, many times. I went to Barb’s and Carol’s and (baseball coach) Augie’s (Garrido) and Lynn’s inductions, and I was always impressed,” she said. “When I went to these things, I always told Lynn it wasn’t a big deal. After 50 years, it wasn’t something I thought a lot about. …
“I really hadn’t had it on my radar, and it caught me by surprise. I didn’t realize how special I’d feel when I got the news. When I was told, I was on cloud nine. I’m glad it came this late in life. It’s a pick-me-up at age 67, and it was a big surprise that brought me an unexpected feeling of elation. I didn’t realize how special this was going to make me feel.”
The concept of Burdick-Greenwood being 67 — complete with two surgically replaced hips and surgically shrunken ankle ligaments that allow her to walk down the street without her ankles rolling over like Burdick-Greenwood once did during one of her stratospheric vaults — takes some fitting in the mental Samsonite. Especially if you ever saw her blast off a vault or spin off the uneven bars. And especially when you understand the impact Burdick-Greenwood had on the CSUF women’s gymnastics program.
Always a coach who saw five moves down the chessboard — he introduced nutritionists, brought in pioneering sports psychologist Ken Ravizza and even live pianists for the floor exercises — Rogers knew what kind of power and unharnessed energy Burdick-Greenwood possessed before she did.
Burdick-Greenwood said her mom got her into gymnastics to keep her “from tumbling down the stairs or swinging from the chandeliers.” Rogers brought that energy and raw power to CSUF and before Burdick-Greenwood knew her way around the campus, told her that she’d win a national championship in vault.
The following spring in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Burdick-Greenwood validated Rogers’ crystal ball, winning the national title in the vault as a freshman. Employing a difficult vault Rogers introduced earlier that season, Burdick-Greenwood scored a 9.6 in the prelims and a 9.5 in the finals, making her the first Titan to win a national title in gymnastics and the first Titan to be named an All-American.
“I landed it, and it was a moment that went so fast,” she said. “You don’t know how to compare yourself regionally or locally, and you get to the national level and he convinced you that you were better than everyone else and you believed it.”
The following season, Burdick-Greenwood finished second to Penn State’s Ann Carr in the all-around, earning not just the second of three All-American honors she’d win, but also earning that trip to Romania. There, she and CSUF teammate Bonnie Jordan mingled with college gymnasts from all over the world, staying in rooms they swore were bugged. Burdick-Greenwood won the bronze in vault and took fifth in the all-around.
In Burdick-Greenwood’s junior year, the Titans won the AIAW national title, beating Penn State by one-tenth of a point as Myslak-Roetert finished second in the all-around, Susan Archer fifth and Burdick-Greenwood sixth. Earlier that year in a dual meet against Penn State at Titan Gym, Burdick-Greenwood scored a 9.95 on the uneven bars, setting a program record that lasted for years.
“Lynn had such an influence on my life that I have to brag on him,” she said. “We weren’t a competitive program. We didn’t have Title IX or any of those things. It was a groundswell. We started the movement of competitive college athletics, and Lynn played such a role in that. He brought in athletes who were hungry and not past their prime and built us into a great program. He was ahead of his time.”
So was Burdick-Greenwood.
She played a key role in a dynasty, and in every dynasty, someone has to start the engine. Someone has to be “the first.” And that person is invariably ahead of their time.
Now retired from a career as an auditor and financial analyst, happily living in San Diego, working part-time at a gym, where she talks about how “when the gym is in you, it doesn’t get out of you,” Burdick-Greenwood looks back on a career where being “the first” carries lasting satisfaction.
That satisfaction springs into the air once again when she thinks about the place that served as the literal vault to a well-lived life.
“I owe so much to Cal State Fullerton, and I promise to be a better alum,” she laughed. “I’m proud to say I’m an alum, and I’m proud to say I’m from Cal State Fullerton. I had so much success from all the skills I learned there, and Fullerton was an amazing place. I came out of there with nothing but confidence, which is what you need.”