She flew through the air like she did in every practice, but this time, when she landed, it was wrong.

In a chain reaction, senior Megan Barnes’ entire leg jammed from ankle to hip, her knee hyper extended and her posterior cruciate ligament tore.

“I was doing my dismount off of bars,” Barnes said. “At the time, I did a dismount where I didn’t see the ground before I landed, and I kind of just landed in the wrong position.”

Barnes was practicing during preseason in late November when she sustained the injury to her knee. Her leg was completely swollen a day later and entered surgery a week after the injury.

Even though the first meet of the season wasn’t until the first week in January, Barnes was not ready to compete.

“After surgery it was a lot of physical therapy,” Barnes said. “We really just jumped into getting my leg strong again. They actually didn’t repair my PCL — they just cleaned it up — so we’ve just been really working on getting my strength back, slowly working on getting routines and getting me to a place where I was ready to compete.”

Before the injury, Barnes competed in the all-around, so her unexpected exit from the lineup left a gap of routines and experience.

“It was definitely hard to have a senior and someone with so much experience have an injury like that,” said senior Melanie Tham. “But the great thing about having 17 girls on the team is you do have depth in each of your lineups and that’s something that we have been lacking on in the past. It was good to know we did have people that could step up and fill Megan’s shoes.”

For the first half of the season, Barnes worked on strength training and cheered on her teammates from the sideline. Last week marked the third month out from her injury. The meet Sunday at Iowa was the first time she was able to compete this season.

“I had some nerves going into it,” Barnes said. “But it felt really good to get back out there and know that my goal of getting back into everything had finally happened.”

Barnes will not be able to return to the all-around competition, but by the end of the season could be performing in three of the four rotations. Her teammates are glad to see her return to the lineups.

“It’s good [to have her back],” Tham said. “Megan has been a great competitor for the last three years and just seeing her doing bars and out on the beam is encouraging because she did leave a pretty big gap when she got injured, so it’s nice that for the second half of the season we can count on her in the lineups.”

Barnes will compete on the uneven bars and balance beam in front of a home crowd when the No. 13 Cyclones face Minnesota 7 p.m. Friday at Hilton Coliseum.

Lineup shuffle

Iowa State’s lineups have been in shuffle mode to accommodate several other injuries as Barnes was not the only gymnast to experience an injury this season.

“It is the nature of our sport that you do get big injuries,” Tham said. “Especially at our age right now, because we’re old to be gymnasts — our bodies are breaking down so at this age we do have a lot of injuries.”

Due to mistakes and the changing lineups because of injuries, the Cyclones registered their second lowest score this season last week at Iowa with a 194.475. The team still managed to beat Iowa, but it is looking forward to competing Friday against Minnesota in order to get back up into the 195–196 range.

“We’re looking forward to competing at home again,” Tham said. “We have a pretty big rivalry with Minnesota and we’re looking forward to starting up that competition again since we haven’t seen them yet this year.”

Minnesota is unranked, but its season-high is a 195.325, a score that would have taken down the Cyclones last week.