Forest Lake grad faced new coaching challenges to help her get to Olympics
Jess Graba, a 1987 graduate of Forest Lake, is heading to Paris to coach reigning U.S. Olympic all-around champion gymnast Sunisa Lee at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. The games, held next Friday, July 26, through Sunday, Aug. 11, will be the second time Graba has taken his star athlete to the Olympics.
Graba says he never would have thought that he would be where he is now when he and his brother, Jeff Graba, opened up Midwest Gymnastics Center in 1995 after graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1992.
“There is no way I would’ve ever dreamed [of this],” Jess said. “Even now, when I go to Paris, it won’t feel real. Tokyo didn’t feel real. World Championships don’t feel real. I mean, I grew up idolizing these people, and now I’m on the floor. It doesn’t feel like I usually belong there, so that’s a cool feeling to realize that you’re kind of living your childhood dream.”
Both Jess Graba and his brother competed in wrestling and gymnastics during their time in Forest Lake — wrestling through school and club gymnastics through Flyaways. The brothers eventually chose gymnastics over wrestling and created a coaching career out of it, which started with coaching at high schools and local gymnastics centers.
Jess is still the owner of Midwest Gymnastics, while Jeff helms Auburn University’s women’s gymnastics program. Following the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Jess also started coaching for Team USA’s development program.
Jess has coached Lee, a St. Paul-native, since she was 6 years old, while Jeff also coached Lee during her 2022 and 2023 seasons competing for Auburn University. Jess’ wife, Alison Lim, has also helped him coach Lee.
A trial getting to the trials
The journey to get to even the Olympic trials was anything but conventional, and nothing was guaranteed for the 21-year-old. When Lee competes at the Olympics next week, she will have had only about seven months of training under her belt due to health challenges, as she was diagnosed with kidney disease and didn’t train at all in 2023, beginning in January of this year.
Graba admits, “This is not something you do in seven months.”
Once her training got going, it was uncharted territory for Graba.
“That’s probably the hardest coaching job that I’ve had, just because there were so many unknowns,” he said. “When you have an athlete that you don’t have any of those things, but you have the normal stuff — like normal injuries, normal jammed ankles or sore backs or shoulders or whatever — there’s kind of some blueprint on what to do with that. And so you can kind of pick and choose from past history. ‘OK, what worked for me before? What worked for these other people?’ And I can use that.
“I mean, there was nothing. We had no idea what we could do, what we couldn’t do, what her body could handle, what her body couldn’t handle. And the mental part of it, the mental health on her side. I mean, you had a 20-year-old that was just told you have two life-threatening illnesses. The gymnastics was not what was on our mind at that point,” he said.
He and Lee took a day-to-day approach.
“It wasn’t necessarily a plan. It was, we were taking every day as it came and just trying to do what we could with each day. Some days that meant nothing,” Graba said.
An unlikely comeback
Lee’s return to the highest level of gymnastics in such a short time wouldn’t have been possible, he said, without all the training and work they put in years ago.
“We were lucky that we worked so darn hard when she was younger,” Graba said, later adding: “Even though I didn’t see it when Suni was 19 and winning the (Olympic) games, I see it now when she was ill and injured and having to come back and wanted to do it. … We maximized when she was young, and we’re reaping the benefits now that she’s older.”
Lee’s return itself was hard enough, but to make a second Olympic team as a female gymnast was another difficult accomplishment. She was one of 16 strong gymnasts vying for one of five spots in the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Trials at the Target Center late last month.
“I mean, I would say that pretty much every kid on the floor at trials could have made the Olympics at any other team in the world,” Graba said of the competition.
Not only did Lee earn one of the five qualifying spots on Team USA, but she came in second, scoring a 111.675 behind Simone Biles’ 117.225, after watching three fellow gymnasts’ injuries keep them out of contention for the games.
“[It was] one of the craziest meets I’ve ever been a part of,” he said, later saying, “It was a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress, but at the end of it, wow, that was one of the coolest experiences ever.”
In the end, her second-place finish and being named to the team was even more unlikely than her seven-month comeback.
“To make the U.S. team is, I mean, anything other than saying it’s a dream come true is probably doing it a major disservice.”
A second Olympics
Graba explains that Lee’s Olympic return isn’t just about trying to win again.
“She didn’t really need to try to do this again,” he said. “I mean, a lot of people, I think, usually would say ‘Why would you try to do it again? You already won everything. The only way to go is down.’ And I think a lot of people just kind of miss the boat on that. You don’t do it just to win. You don’t do it for the medals. You do it for the personal achievement. You do it for that: the challenge. The first one was its own challenge.
“This one’s a completely different challenge. ... And I’d have to be honest with you and tell you I’m more relieved than I am excited. I’m just relieved that we actually navigated that properly, so that we could get here. And I’m just super relieved and just really proud of what she’s been able to accomplish,” Graba said.
Jess will be joined by his wife in Paris. While she also coaches Lee, she will be coaching Louisa Blanco, who qualified for Team Colombia. They have been helping Blanco train the past few years in hopes of qualifying, and she accomplished exactly that.
Graba is excited to be a part of this year’s Olympics since the last Olympics were held in 2021 during the pandemic.
“It wasn’t very crowded or anything. So now it’s going to be a completely different experience,” Graba said. “I’m looking forward to that part of it.”
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