A growing list of injuries to her head, neck and spine eventually became too long for her to fight through, team doctors told her. Stunned, her first call was to her mother, Laura. She was searching for answers as the realization set in — the sport she had risen to the top of was being taken away from her.

“We were just in shock,” said Laura Wrighte, who coached Freedom while Sydney was there. “All of a sudden, it just stopped.”

Wrighte medically retired from gymnastics that fall. What should have been her third season with the Tigers was just weeks away.

The premature end to her career sent Wrighte, now 23, back to Freedom, where she’s in her first season as a volunteer assistant coach. Photos of her soaring on beams and bars and the accolades she helped attain adorn the walls of the gym and the hallways she now coaches in.

Returning home was how Wrighte grappled with the sudden end to her days competing. Coaching, a way to remain in the sport, is how she moves forward.

“Once you’re done with gymnastics, it’s gone,” she said. “And you’re like, ‘How do I get it back?’ ”

Injuries began hindering Wrighte as she dominated in high school. Her neck and spine pain started after a car crash, worsened as the contortions of gymnastics wore on her and were compounded by a severe concussion after a fall on bars.

Wrighte saw a spine specialist her senior year and started a nerve ablation procedure, which destroys part of the nerve tissue to interrupt pain signals. She was told it would work for two years, but then the pain might resurface.

Then Wrighte broke her hand as a freshman at Auburn, which kept her sidelined her entire first season. Almost exactly two years after the start of the spine treatment, the pain flared up again.

Wrighte’s body was crumbling. Continuing to compete was becoming impossible.

She initially disagreed with the doctors’ orders to stop; this was no different from previous setbacks, she thought.

“I was blindsided at that point,” she said.

Conversations with her family and the time crunch of trying to complete a nursing degree while competing in a Division I sport pushed her to accept the prognosis. Next, she had to find a way to live without the sport that had consumed her life.

Wrighte spent the first year following her athletic retirement distanced from Auburn gymnastics, but being roommates with former teammates kept her from getting as far away as she wanted.

For her final year, she reconnected with her high school team and went to nearly all of Auburn’s meets. Her mother could tell she wasn’t finished with gymnastics.

“I think that’s one of the reasons she’s coaching — just because she just stopped,” Laura Wrighte said. “She has more to give to the sport.”

Upon graduating from Auburn in 2022, Wrighte returned to Northern Virginia, where she was the most decorated high school gymnast in the area in some time. She was the All-Met Gymnast of the Year her sophomore, junior and senior seasons and led Freedom to its first state title in 2016 and another in 2018. Laura Wrighte was the coach for that stretch, when they turned the Eagles into a perennial power.

A spot on the coaching staff opened before this season. Alli Wrighte, a Freedom assistant and Sydney’s sister-in-law, knew whom to ask to fill it.

Wrighte accepted — but in a limited capacity. She works from roughly 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. a few days per week in the neonatal intensive care unit at Inova Fairfax. The offer meant adding to an already abnormal routine, a change she was wary about taking on.

But it took little time for Wrighte to blow past her intentions of just helping out from time to time. She now attends every practice and meet.

“It’s really cool for them to see somebody that was in their shoes that was really successful,” said Kelsey Laird, Freedom’s second-year head coach. “They really listen to what she has to say because she’s been on our team and knows what it’s like.”

A largely inexperienced squad has allowed the athletes and Wrighte to learn together. The Tigers finished fifth in their first meet of the season and third in their second. On Dec. 18, Freedom captured its first victory.

Wrighte’s new role reinvigorated her appreciation for the sport. She was supposed to dominate gymnastics herself, but she has learned her purpose comes in leading others.

“Now I get to see a different view of gymnastics,” she said. “I get to have a really positive impact on other people. It’s fun getting back into the sport and falling back in love with it.”