Maria Bachuchin's life dedicated to gymnastics rewarded with induction in Indiana Gymnastics Hall of Fame

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

To hear Maria Bachuchin describe what she saw and heard as a little girl first thing in the morning during consecutive summers shifts the question from, “How could she give so much of her life to gymnastics?” to “How could she not?”
Think maybe a child growing up in a big baseball house might be predetermined to like the sport if a World Series hero lived with the family for a couple of stretches?
When her last name was DeMarino, Maria experienced the gymnastics equivalent of that.
Through a family connection, Suzuko Seki, a gymnast from Japan who had competed in seven events at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, stayed for two summers at the DeMarino household in Monessen, Pennsylvania in the early ‘60s, when Maria was close to turning 10.
The way Bachuchin recounts those memories, it’s apparent she is seeing and hearing them with the clarity befitting something from a few hours ago.
“It was incredible what she would do before she would even eat breakfast. She would get up and she would do her morning training on our back porch,” Bachuchin said. “She had a jump rope, and I was just mesmerized watching her because the rope would sing. You could not even see the rope because she would be on a pattern of double jump, jump, double jump, jump and the rope would whistle.”
Effortless press handstands and pirouettes too from one of the world’s most graceful athletes, right in front of Maria.
Like any accomplished dancer, certain music speaks to Bachuchin, and still, after all these decades, the Olympic gymnast’s rope has as loud a voice as any.
“Then when she would come into our gym and because she was so advanced being an Olympian we learned so much from Suzy because she could do things that people in the United States weren’t doing at that time,” Maria recalled. “So, it was a fortunate thing for me to be exposed to gymnastics at a very young age and high level. And that’s why I fell in love with it so much.”
In turn, it has been a fortunate thing for the sport of gymnastics in the state of Indiana. Bachuchin has done so much in and for the sport that she will be inducted as part of the Class of 2025 Indiana Gymnastics Hall of Fame at a July 12 luncheon at the Athenaeum Turners, a National Historic Landmark, located at 401 East Michigan Street in Indianapolis. The event begins at noon Eastern time with a tour of the historic building guided by historian William Selm. The Rathskeller Restaurant will serve a German buffet luncheon in the Upper Ballroom at 1 p.m. Adult tickets are $35.00; children 4-8: $13.50; children 9-12: $27.00.
Following the induction ceremony, all guests meet in the Rathskeller beer garden downstairs with the inductees at 3:30 p.m.
Reservations and the purchase of banquet tickets can be made by personal check made out to Terry Corcoran or by using Zelle at (317) 443-0134 and confirmed by emailing Terry Spencer Corcoran at thandstand@gmail.com for address and more information by Friday, June 27.
Bachuchin will be inducted with Chuck Earle, Judy Lynne Ferber, Doug Griffith and deceased Professor Joseph K. Weissmeuller.
Bachuchin’s induction comes two months shy of two years since her sister, Donna, gained induction into the University of Pittsburgh Athletics Hall of Fame for her work as gymnastics coach.
In large part but not entirely, Bachuchin earned the INGHOF honor for her contributions as Chesterton High School coach from 1979 through 2003, when assisted by husband, Mike. They coached the Trojans to three state championships (1993, 2000, 2002) and three runner-up finishes. She was named IHSAA Coach of the Year four times, was a finalist for National Coach of the Year once and compiled a 256-34 record in dual meets.
Hers and Mike’s Chesterton gymnasts were so well trained that five of them won individual state championships, 54 earned first-team all-state honors and two won the prestigious Mental Attitude Award.
Precious few roster spots are available for college gymnasts, even fewer scholarships. Only 81 NCAA gymnastics programs exist, 62 of them Division I. Yet, the Bachuchins coached 11 Division I gymnasts at Chesterton.
The athletes arrived at the high school already schooled in the details needed to look beautiful in the air in a way that disguises the demands for power and precision. Maria and Mike were co-owners of Lakeshore Gymnastics in Chesterton from 1986 through 2006, when 24 instructors and coaches came under the Bachuchins’ watch and the weekly attendance was about 500 students from 1991-2006.
Inducted into the inaugural Chesterton High School Athletic Hall of Fame class in 2009, she and Mike remain fixtures at Chesterton gymnastic events, Mike as meet director, Maria as a judge. The IHSAA takes advantage of their prowess in those areas during the state tournament series as well.
Coached in high school by her uncle Baldo Giannini, a gymnastics icon, Maria competed for Monessen High her first three years and made it to state as an individual her senior year. Even with that much success, her true passion was elsewhere: dance. In high school she already was choreographing floor routines for teammates. She knew how to picture what she wanted and knew how to communicate it. A coaching star was born well before she became a coach.
Mike and Maria both came from families with strong gymnastics backgrounds, so naturally it was through football that they got to know each other better. Mike was a football player at Slippery Rock University in Western Pa. until his third knee surgery turned him into the equipment manager his senior year. Maria was a member of the dance troupe that performed at football games, home and away.
It never occurred to either of them at the time that they would live anywhere but in Western Pa.
Then the steel industry in Pennsylvania collapsed.
“They didn’t call it a valedictorian, but Maria was voted by the (Slippery Rock) faculty the most outstanding senior of the graduating class in education and special education,” Mike said. “She didn’t even get an interview in Pennsylvania. So, she had a cousin who worked at Midwest Steel out here and lived in Valpo and said here are six addresses of schools in Porter County, Indiana. We applied to all six. We had interviews in all six schools. Within a one-week period, we bounced from school corporation to school corporation and moved out here.”
Mike was the director of Chesterton’s YMCA and Maria was working in special education in Gary before leaving to teach kindergarten in Chesterton.
By 1977, they were married and by the fall of 1978 Maria was the Trojans’ head gymnastics coach after agreeing to a trade suggested by her predecessor, Carol Dick.
“When I came on the scene I was judging and she knew I had gotten the job at Chesterton schools and she said to me, ‘Would you like to take the team over? Would you have any interest in coaching?’ And I said I think I’d rather coach than judge at this point, so we traded places and John Mathias, the athletic director was fine with that, and it just worked out,” Bachuchin said.
That’s an epic understatement.
Considering how many gymnasts and instructors Bauchuchin sent into the world as high school and club coaches, it’s worth wondering how much smaller the sport’s profile would be in Indiana if the devastation of the steel industry in Pennsylvania had not driven Maria and Mike to Indiana.
Before long, in a very real sense, Maria did in Indiana what Seki had done in Pennsylvania, bringing gymnastics secrets to what to her was a new world.
“When I got to Indiana, we started at the ground level. We didn’t even have four events at Chesterton,” Maria said. “The first meet I took the kids to, not high school but YMCA, we only had three events and the day before I said there are really four events in gymnastics, but we don’t have a vault and we don’t have a long enough runway to teach you to vault.”
Give Mike Bachuchin a roadblock to a gymnastics meet and watch him work around it.
“Mike put 3 2X4s bolted together over two sawhorses that somebody had thrown out that Mike saw down by the YMCA,” Maria remembered. “The guy said we could take them. We brought them into the Y, put a mat over it and had the kids jump over it. We went down to the Valpo YMCA and we had two kids win vault.”
That was just the beginning of the Bachuchins fighting to improve conditions for gymnastics in town, regardless of the talent of the gymnasts on any given year.
Most of the gymnasts Maria has known through the decades weren’t nearly as famous as Seki, but one of them was, and then some.
Cathy Rigby, so instrumental in the explosion of gymnastics in the United States with her performance in the 1968 Olympics at the age of 15, also stayed at the DeMarino house once and, according to Maria, was “very nice.” Of course she was. A whole nation of TV viewers couldn’t have been wrong.
“As a gymnast phenomenal, phenomenal, she was like poetry in motion. Her balance beam routine, and don’t forget when she competed it was a wooden beam at the time, and naturally she did not do the flipping and acro skills that they do now, but had she been born in this era she would have been able to do that also,” Bachcuchin said. “She was a tremendous athlete, and she was also very personable, a lot of fun to talk to, to be around, just a joyful person. She played Peter Pan for a long time on Broadway and that little pixy smile, that was totally her as a 15-year-old.”
Bachuchin hasn’t kept busy pursuing celebrities since she retired after the 2015-16 school year, but has remained busy. In one of her many volunteer activities, Bachuchin gets a charge out of seeing boys and girls trigger crowd reactions at the annual Exchange Club talent show that she chairs.
Regardless of whether she’s ready for it or comfortable with it, the spotlight will shine on her this time, on July 12 at a luncheon in at historic Athenaeum Turners, a way for a sport to thank one of its long-standing champions.