UF Gymnast Competes in First International Competition for Morocco
This week, as August winds down, Florida senior gymnast Danie Ferris will achieve her dream of competing for Morocco at the 2026 Mediterranean Games in Taranto, Italy. The event will be the culmination of months of preparations for her first elite international competition.
Ferris was raised by her mother, Julia Simon, who is from Morocco, and she visited the country throughout her childhood to visit family and friends. To honor her mother and her heritage, Danie has consistently used music inspired by her ethnicity in her collegiate floor routines.
“A lot of my floor music are Arab derived,” Ferris said. “I never did music like that growing up because I felt kind of embarrassed, but as I grew up, I really embraced my heritage and where I was from, knowing that it does make me unique.”
This process has been ongoing for years as Ferris made trips to Morocco to obtain the necessary documentation to compete for the team. She said there were times when she wasn’t sure it would ever come to fruition, but almost two years later, she’s participating as part of Team Morocco.
There are a few other firsts in Taranto as she is competing in the bars and beam apparatus competitively for the first time since high school.
“It’s obviously something I’ve been thinking about a lot,” she said. “I’ve trained all-around since I’ve been in college, so I’ve had the skills there. It was just working them back up, especially with bars.”
Ferris is joined by her mother, but she trained with a new team of coaches from Morocco for the duration of the competition.
She said her focus this summer while preparing for the Games was to perfect her routines as much as possible to ensure that she didn’t need to rely on much coaching while in Italy.
Her coach at UF, Jeremy Miranda, said she spent the summer dedicated to this task, and he thinks the hard work will pay off. As the team’s assistant coach, Miranda oversees the creative aspects of the gymnast’s floor routines, including Ferris’ Moroccan-inspired ones.
Under his guidance, Ferris chose to keep her floor music from last season’s floor routine, but she has added a third tumbling pass to increase the difficulty.
“With elite routines, we just need them to hit,” Miranda said. “It’s not like collegiate gymnastics where you’re trying to chase perfection. Elite gymnastics is all about trying to boost that difficulty.”
Although Miranda expressed sadness for not joining Ferris in Taranto for the competition, he is excited to find out what she will bring to the program upon her return.
“Our athletes thrive off of learning from each other,” he said. “So allowing them the opportunity to be able to do that and come back and share is really special.”
On the first day of competition Sunday, Ferris competed in all four events; however, her Yurchenko 1.5 vault was disqualified after the officials ruled that she had begun her attempt before the green light.
Category: Gator Sports, Gators Gymnastics
