"Simone never would have made it in my gym."
Aimee Boorman has heard that line, over and over, from other coaches when they talk about the gymnast she helped lift to heights never seen within their sport.
"They say it with a sense of pride," Boorman tells USA TODAY Sports, "and it's like, 'So you realize how many potential Simones you have pushed out of your gym?' "
Biles was the kid who always loved the gymnastics part, but not the work that went into making her the best. Some days she just wanted to go home.
Those characteristics didn't necessarily change as she grew into the decorated champion America knew. Boorman, though, was willing to manage them in a way others wouldn't.
Biles' coach from age 7 through her four-gold-medal performance at the 2016 Rio Olympics remembers her as one of her more challenging pupils.
"If everybody is just strict and obedient, you grow stale as a coach," Boorman says. "So when you have somebody who's throwing something new at you all the time, on an emotional level, on a personality level, you gotta grow. And I think some of those other coaches weren't willing to grow.
"When people say, 'Well, there's only going to be one Simone,' I'm like, 'That's not true.' You have to know how to manage that athlete to get them to the point they could be a Simone."
Boorman's approach - nurturing, forgiving, even relenting - was novel to coaching within a sport of forced discipline and regulation. She lays out her methodology, ingrained in her by a tumultuous childhood experience, in "The Balance: My Years Coaching Simone Biles."
The book, which was released last week, reveals a back story of how athletes develop and mature but also how they can have giggles on their face before and after their most triumphant Olympic moments.
Boorman and co-author Steve Cooper spoke with us about facing unique challenges while coaching and parenting our athletes and how we can overcome them in unexpected ways.
"Nothing about Simone's greatness was inevitable," Cooper said during our Zoom interview. "It was a process. It wasn't just luck."
Boorman is often asked if she knew when Biles would become superstar. The answer: When she became one.
"Up until that point, anything can happen," she says, "and any given day, if Simone didn't have that passion and that love for gymnastics inside of her, she could be like, 'I'm done. I'm gonna go run track.' "
Boorman recalls the joy she felt as a young girl in the early 1980s, when she first flung herself from the bars of Lakeshore Academy in Chicago, but also how quickly a reckless coach drained it from her.
No matter how long she stood on the balance beam, her arms raised until they were numb trying to get Coach Jeremy's attention, he wasn't satisfied. His name is a pseudonym, but also an extreme archetype for an era of the sport: No positive reinforcement, no acknowledgement of effort and sometimes little hope.
"That constant negative input made me have total lack of belief in myself," she says.
And yet, like most kids, Aimee yearned to please him. She arrived early one day, straining to grab his undivided attention by working out on her own. She broke her leg. Then he ignored her for months until she finally quit.
"I was really useless to him because I couldn't compete," she says.
She was pulled back when she coached preschool kids after school a couple of years later. There was something bright within them that she used to feel, something we can so easily push out of young athletes if we don't nurture it. It was a light she saw in a 7-year-old who bounced around Bannon's, the gym north of Houston where Boorman started working as a young adult.
Simone Biles couldn't sit still, but when she did, she pushed herself up off the ground with her arms and slid her legs from straight in front of her to a position in which she was lying on her stomach.
"What she was doing is not normal," Boorman says. "We knew that she was going to be able to learn very quickly, but she was just a little girl, and she didn't like to do the conditioning, and she didn't want to have to take extra turns. She just wanted it to be fun. And when it wasn't fun, she wasn't having any part of it. She didn't want to be involved at all."
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Like other kids, Biles had fears. One was a mental block on her beam series. Boorman would ask her to complete it three times, but would never leave her out there too long like Jeremy had done. They would just come back the next day and try again, a give-and-take that would continue throughout their time together.
"There were times that she would come in the gym in the morning and she would have a sense of dread about what she was going to have to do based on what she did or didn't finish the day before," Boorman says. "And I hope that when she walked in and saw me, and I was like, 'Good morning,' and I was very light with her, that then she could go, 'OK, wait a minute. Maybe I'm not in trouble. Maybe I didn't disappoint her.' "
Boorman, through the torture, had felt like she was letting Coach Jeremy down. To this day, she tells her students, "There's no possible way you could disappoint me."
It's up to them, not her, what they became. It's her job to support what they want.
"As a coach, you could never want it more than the athlete," she says, "and if you do want it more than the athlete, then there's a problem. I know a lot of overzealous young coaches who are like, 'Oh, but I want an Olympian,' but you're never going to have an Olympian because that's what you want.
"If we focus too much on the championship and on that win, then we're losing the human in the process."
She likes to live in a "compliment sandwich," where constructive criticism is surrounded by praise of effort, even on so-called bad days. Those are a matter of perspective, anyway.
"I have an elite gymnast (who) had been out of the gym for a couple of months, not really training, and she came back in and successfully did a skill that she hadn't done in two months, and she was like, 'That was terrible,' " Boorman says. "And I was like, 'You haven't done it in two months, and you did it. We're going to celebrate those wins, and it's going to be better tomorrow."
Boorman wanted her students to be comfortable around her so they would express themselves. That way, she could see deep inside and better understand them.
"Simone's not a person to go (in) the corner and go through her stuff in her head to get her in the zone," she would learn. "She has to be there, completely relaxed, cheering on other people. And then when the green light goes on for her to compete, she's like, game on. But she doesn't waste any of that in her mind. In her mind, that focus is a waste. Other athletes are completely different.
"So it doesn't say anything about what process is correct, but it's what process is best for each athlete. So for younger coaches who are bringing up the athletes who are not elite yet, you have to give them all of the different tools, and they're going to find out which process works best for them."
Biles realized her connection with "Coach Aimee" at 13, when she was invited to a U.S. women's national team development camp and saw teammates who weren't as close with their coaches.
They all trained under the strict orders of the program, which wasn't for Biles.
"People who are ridiculously talented don't have to