Her blue leotard sparkling under the gymnasium lights, bars specialist Anyssa K. Alvarado (BS ’24) soared, spinning in midair, a brief moment of weightlessness before sticking the landing, arms outspread like a bird’s wings. On her face: a huge, blinding smile.
Alvarado—nicknamed “Smiley” by her friends and family—started off the 2024 gymnastics season with a career high on the bars: a whopping 9.950 out of 10. “It was really cool,” Alvarado says, beaming. “I had been trying to get that score for quite a while.”
Alvarado’s dismount—a full twisting double layout—is a skill only a handful of gymnasts across the country are doing. “She got bored with [the more common] dismount,” says Coach Guard W. Young (BA ’01), and wanted to make it “much more difficult.”
She began gymnastics at age 3, rising through the ranks before landing at BYU, where she is joined in her final year by her freshman sister, Alilah J. Alvarado (’27). “Being with Anyssa [on the team] has brought me closer, and she’s become one of my best friends,” Alilah says.
The granddaughter of hard-working Honduran immigrants, Alvarado is resilient in the face of challenges. She came to BYU as a non-Latter-day Saint and struggled through her parents’ divorce, all while balancing her psychology and computer-science coursework with grueling practice hours.
On top of this, Alvarado is a first-generation student. “There are expectations that a lot of people don’t have,” she says. “There’s a lot of pressure on making college worthwhile.”
Through all the challenges in her college career, “Smiley” has more than earned her nickname, says Young. She “always has this beautiful smile,” he says. “[She’s] someone that brings a light into you and builds up your spirit when you’re around her.”
