#MyPTStory | Patient Success Story
While most 4-year-olds don’t even know what they want to eat or wear on any given day, Gabby Smith had already made up her mind that she wanted to be a cheerleader.
Her mom, Sara Smith, puts it plainly.
“Gabby begged for a long time to do cheer before we finally opened up a phone book and found a place,” she shared.
With the confidence of someone much older, Gabby claimed her place performing somersaults and cartwheels and learning all the basic cheer positions. It was the kind of fun that introduces little kids to dynamic movement and performance. But for Gabby, it was much more than that. Over the years, cheer became a part of her identity.
Now, at 12 years old, she competes on two All Star teams with The Academy of Acro Sports and Elite Cheer in Tri-Cities, WA, mastering jumps, tumbling passes, and stunts that fill competition floors and put teams on podiums. Routines that have to be perfect when it counts.
Ask Gabby what she loves about it and she doesn’t hesitate.
“It’s fun! I like making new friends, and I like performing,” she said. Simple, true, and eight years in the making.
While social connections and performances are highlights, cheer is demanding both physically and mentally. Practice dominates the girls’ after-school hours, with some, including Gabby, putting in four hours a day, three to four days per week.
This fall, Gabby was six months into what was shaping up to be her biggest competitive season yet. She was practicing 12 to 16 hours a week across her two teams, building toward a showcase and a competition trip to Kentucky. Then, during a full routine run-through, Gabby went down.
A setback with serious stakes
What felt like a bad roll turned out to be a fracture — the lateral malleolus of her right fibula, the outside portion of her ankle.
In quiet reflection, Gabby shrugged.
“All I was wondering when it happened was if it was broken,” she said.
In contrast to Gabby’s matter-of-fact way of acknowledging and accepting what had happened, Sara’s emotions ran high.
“I was devastated,” she said. “I was angry, and I was devastated for her. Here she is in her eighth year of cheer, she’s never been injured before, and now here we are at the start of a big comp season, and this happens.”
For Sara to see all the hard work her daughter had put into the season end in injury was difficult. But together they decided to make the best of the situation, grateful that surgery would not be necessary. Gabby went to practices — working on upper body and core conditioning, cheering her teammates on from the sidelines, still showing up. They even blinged out her walking boot and flew to Kentucky to support the team from the sidelines.
From walking boot to physical therapy
When the boot finally came off, Gabby was cleared to start physical therapy. Simple enough in theory — but finding a clinic that could actually get a 12-year-old competitive cheerleader in the door quickly was another story.
Sara had been down the PT road before with her older son, a soccer player, and it had left her skeptical. Rushed appointments, generic exercises, the sense that the goal was volume over outcomes. So, when she started calling around for Gabby, the weeks-long waits she encountered felt all too familiar.
That’s when a friend and fellow cheer parent offered a reference to Therapeutic Associates West Kennewick PT.
“She told me to call. She said that Ken Call is amazing and an athlete himself and would give Gabby a lot of his time,” Sara recalled.
Sara called. It was December 30th — the same day Gabby’s boot came off. They got her in that day.
In the world of physical therapy, same-day access is not something patients expect. For Sara, who had spent days calling around and hitting walls, it stopped her in her tracks.
“It felt like it was meant to be, basically,” she said.
Treating the athlete, not just the ankle
Gabby’s first appointment was an evaluation with physical therapist Kevin Paulson. From the very first interaction, Sara knew this experience was going to be different.
“The intake, the questions — it was very thorough,” she said. “They gave us time. I didn’t feel like they were trying to get us in and out.”
For Kevin, rebuilding Gabby’s ankle was only part of her rehab. There was something else that needed rebuilding too.
“There’s a little bit of what I like to call mistrust,” he explained. “You trust your body to support you and do the activities you want to do, and then something like this happens. It can almost be like a foreign thing — this is my foot, but this foot hurt me. It betrayed me, in a sense. So, how do you build that relationship back?”
Kevin started with the fundamentals: isometric ankle strengthening, inversion and eversion work, plantar flexion exercises, and single-leg balance to rebuild Gabby’s tolerance to standing on a healed fracture. But from day one, he was thinking beyond standard ankle rehab. He was thinking about what All Star cheer actually demands of a person’s body.
Kevin focused on foundational preparation: building Gabby’s strength, then converting that strength into power, with particular emphasis on force absorption and force production — the ability to load and land, over and over, the way cheer requires. Clinic director and physical therapist Ken Call, who has experience working with cheer athletes, stepped in alongside Kevin to help design a recovery plan that was built around the specific physical demands of Gabby’s sport.
To help, Sara brought in videos from the gym — footage of Gabby’s teammates performing the routines full of jumps, tumbles and stunts that Gabby would eventually need to get back to. Kevin and the clinic team studied them. They asked Gabby to walk them through the movements.
“It was clear they were doing research on the side about cheer and about Gabby’s situation specifically,” Sara emphasized. “It didn’t matter who you got on any given day, everybody knew her story. Whether it was Kevin or Ken or anyone else — they were all lovely and all wonderful and they all worked together.”
Sara, who has been a high school teacher for 23 years, recognized and appreciated the dynamic immensely.
“I know how important it is to work with your peers,” she said. “You make yourself that much stronger when you have a good team.”
Kevin sees it the same way, likening the clinic team to a football team where everyone has their role.
“We do a lot of talking about our patients — what works, what doesn’t work, what they like, what they don’t like. If there’s a miscommunication, we don’t hit the objective. So, we communicate.”
Having Sara as an active partner in Gabby’s care made a difference, too. Kevin kept her fully informed at every step, and she made sure Gabby followed through on home exercises between appointments.
“When you have the parent on your team, that really helps,” Kevin said.
Back on the floor — sooner than anyone expected
There was a January competition on the schedule for just eleven days after Gabby started PT. Nobody was expecting her to be ready. But she went to her appointments twice a week, did her exercises at home, and followed the plan.
Then, a teammate sprained her fingers and couldn’t base. The coaches called Sara: could Gabby step in? Not tumbling, not jumps, no stunts … just base, ankle taped and braced?
Sara asked Kevin. He looked at the clinical picture: the fibula is non-weight bearing, they were eight weeks out from the fracture, the bone had healed. The real variables were strength and trust, and they had been building both.
“Thankfully, she had years of experience to pull from,” Kevin said. “Once we showed her that she could do it, she was ready to go.”
They cleared her. Gabby competed.
“We weren’t expecting that,” Sara said, noting that it gave her and Gabby a real sense of progress. “That was a nice, ‘Okay, we’re getting there.’”
Getting cleared to compete — even in a limited role — made a full return feel like something within reach. For Gabby and Sara both, it was proof that physical therapy was working, and they kept showing up.
Sara had been keeping Gabby’s coaches updated throughout the recovery, relaying what the PT team was recommending at each stage. The head coach, herself a former World-level competitive cheerleader, took notice. She told Sara she didn’t know who was treating Gabby, but the guidance Sara was passing along was spot-on — things like not keeping an athlete in a brace longer than necessary.
Her advice to Sara was simple: whoever that is, stay with them.
A PT team for the whole family
Gabby is back on the floor, she’s competing and she’s getting stronger as she works toward all the tumbling, jumping and stunting that she and her teams hope will land them on the podium at nationals, which are on the horizon!
“I was nervous at first,” Gabby said. “But now I have it back.”
Her family has something else back too — confidence in knowing they now have a PT for life.
“Now I know where to go,” she said. “I love them. Everyone there. I just love their culture.”
For her, her husband, and her kids, there is simply no other option — and she plans to make sure everyone she knows hears about it.
For Kevin, that says everything.
“When you’re out of your sport for two to three months and your practices are daily and three to four hours long, you start to lose a bit of yourself,” he said. “It’s such a big aspect of your life and it’s just all of a sudden taken away from you. To be able to give that back — that’s why we do what we do.“
Get Back to What You Love
Injuries don’t have to sideline your story. Whether you’re chasing a podium, a personal best, or simply the activities that make you feel like yourself, our physical therapy team is here to help you recover with purpose. Like Gabby, you’ll be treated as more than your injury — you’ll be seen, supported, and guided every step of the way. Schedule your evaluation today and take the first step back to doing what you love.
