When Amelia Knight arrived on campus at the University of Illinois as a freshman in 2020, she had no working cell phone, no debit card, and no bedding. Moving from the UK to the US in the midst of the pandemic meant she had to travel alone and quarantine for two weeks before meeting any of her teammates. It was a tough two weeks – but the community she found at Illinois made it all worth it. “Everyone was so welcoming and super helpful,” she said of the team’s support in that difficult transition period. Moving abroad to join a college gymnastics team presented a new challenge, but also an exciting opportunity.
Knight had watched a few of her club teammates from Bristol, England, make the leap to American college gymnastics. Ruby Harrold, Phoebe Turner, and Abi Solari are familiar names to an NCAA gymnastics fan, but for Amelia, they showed her a possible path for her gymnastics career that she never knew she could follow.
As soon as she realized college gymnastics could be an option for her, Knight got to work preparing for the process: she made a spreadsheet of schools to reach out to, set up Zoom calls with coaches, and traveled to America to attend camps at two different programs. She knew she wanted to be somewhere that had all four seasons, wasn’t located…
