The Influence of Sports: How a Former Gymnast, Ballerina, and Figure Skater Apply Their Skills to Law

When one thinks of professional sports, football, basketball, and running float to top of mind. Yet, there are defining characteristics that all athletes—and successful lawyers—embody: Preparation. Time management. Tenacity. Attention to detail. This month, Philadelphia partner Zane Memeger, Los Angeles partner Yardena Zwang-Weissman, and Washington associate Matthew Julyan share stories about their former lives as a competitive gymnast, ballerina, and figure skater, respectively, detail their proudest achievements, and discuss how sports have played a large role and influenced their work as lawyers.

ZANE MEMEGER

What initially drew you to your sport?

My initial interest in gymnastics came about during the 1976 Summer Olympics when I saw Shun Fujimoto (Japan) compete on rings and land a dismount on a broken leg. Japan went on to win the Olympic title, and my fascination with rings started. I was just starting middle school and we would have a gym class segment every year on gymnastics where I seemed to pick things up quickly.

When I got to high school, I gave up wrestling and joined the gymnastics team—trading weight loss for constantly blistered hands from rings, pommel horse, and high bar. My high school coach ran a club team that I also joined and competed for in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Describe your training program and competition/performance commitments.

I competed in Division I meets for James Madison University during my entire undergraduate career. The first two years I was an all-around gymnast (floor exercise, pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars, and high bar) and then I became a specialist in floor exercise, pommel horse, and rings in my junior and senior years of college.

We would work out three to four hours per day, five times a week from September to April, with our weekend competitions running from mid-December through late March. Our coach would provide a weekly schedule to break up training so that we could recover and avoid overuse injuries associated with some of the events.

Tell us about your favorite experience and/or proudest achievement.

We got to compete against teams throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions (Temple, Pittsburgh, Penn State, William & Mary, Towson, Georgia, Louisiana State, Georgia Tech, Radford, Jacksonville State, Eastern Michigan State, and Slippery Rock), but the most memorable experience hands down was with the Naval Academy team, coached by former Olympian Peter Kormann.

The dedication to the ultimate public service was on clear display by the Navy athletes. After meets we would dine in the mess hall with the Midshipmen, and watching them march in, pledge allegiance, and then dine was a remarkable sight.

At one of our meets, I traded team shirts with Jeff Zaun, an all-around gymnast who was briefly held and tortured by Iraqi forces during the Persian Gulf War. That shirt, which I still have along with my retired gear, is a reminder that there are people in this world who are willing to put their lives on the line for the freedoms we hold so dear.

How has being a former competitive athlete prepared you for a career in law?

Each gymnastics routine is generally made up of multiple tricks that take days, weeks, months, or years to learn and master. The failure (and sometimes pain) associated with learning new tricks teaches you to be patient and think of development as a long-term proposition.

A legal career is a marathon, not a sprint, and my gymnastics experience has served me well in that regard.

What lessons that you’ve learned from sports apply to how you work as a lawyer?

Being part of a team is more fun than focusing on individual accomplishments. While I vividly remember the meets where I did well and those where I struggled, those memories pale in comparison to cheering on a teammate after a great routine or telling a teammate that everything is going to be OK when they had an unexpected fall during a routine. You win as a team and lose as a team, and what people remember in the end is whether you were a good teammate.

YARDENA ZWANG-WEISSMAN

What initially drew you to your sport?

It was always about the music for me. Dance feels like an extension of music that I love.

Describe your training program and competition/performance commitments.

At the time, dance was my second full-time job (on top of being a student). I trained for hours every day after school, doing homework at the dance studio. I spent my Saturdays rehearsing for upcoming performances and traveled to different cities during summers to audition for, train with, and perform with ballet companies.

Tell us about your favorite experience and/or proudest achievement. 

I had the privilege of training for many years with one of the most influential women and role models in my life, a former New York City Ballet ballerina named Yvonne Mounsey.

Celebrated choreographers like George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins created many famous original roles specifically for Yvonne in the 1940s and 1950s. Learning, fine-tuning, and recreating some of those roles with Yvonne’s instruction and guidance are without a doubt some of my favorite, and most memorable, experiences to this day.

How has being a former competitive athlete prepared you for a career in law?

Ballet is all about making something that requires hard work and long hours and is really challenging look absolutely effortless when it is done right. The same can be said for the practice of law.

What lessons that you’ve learned from sports apply to how you work as a lawyer?

One of my instructors always said “practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.” The importance of doing all the little things right during your journey and practicing the right way—not necessarily the easy way—to do things stuck with me and easily translates to my work now as a lawyer.

MATTHEW JULYAN

What initially drew you to your sport?

Family. My older sister started figure skating only a few years before me, and I was especially eager to try to find ways to hang out with and impress her. We ended up both being pretty good, so it was one of the things that kept us close, even many years after we both eventually quit skating competitively.

My dad would also always remind me how much I talked about “the jumps” that I saw some of the older skaters doing when I first started. I can still remember going to the rink as a kid and always being amazed by what I saw other skaters do. Even still, bragging rights between siblings was probably the more impactful force that drew me toward skating in the first place.

Describe your training program and competition/performance commitments.

Since about third grade, I was at the rink after school every day, Monday through Friday, for group lessons and public skate sessions. By about fifth grade I was usually at the rink for private coaching and practicing until about 5 pm. Once I was competing more regularly, I would leave middle and high school a period early to get to the rink closer to 2 pm, with off-ice conditioning that finished closer to 6 or 7 pm.

In terms of preparing for competition, we would normally add another day of practice over the weekend in the weeks and sometimes months before. For the competitions themselves, my family would drive or fly across the country after we started qualifying for regional competitions. Even as a kid––but dramatically more so as an adult––I’ve always been grateful for the time, money, and energy my parents invested in something I simply enjoyed doing.

Tell us about your favorite experience and/or proudest achievement.

In 2005, I qualified for and competed in Junior Nationals. I finished sixth overall, even despite falling on a jump my coach and I had wrestled about including in the program. It was a risk, and it definitely hurt thinking I could have placed higher had I not thrown the jump.

It was a tough choice to put on a kid, but it was a defining moment in many ways. I had been training almost every day for months, included a double axel as my first jump in the program, and I had run the same program hundreds of times. I was landing it about 50% in the final days leading up, but no part of me wavered on whether I should try.

The disappointment was intense at the time, but I’m proud of myself for bouncing back and finishing the rest of my program well enough to place only two spots outside the podium.  

My favorite experience was always landing a new jump. I started throwing triples when I was about 13 and reveled in becoming the sort of skater I first admired when I started. I fell more often than I landed, and some jumps took years to learn, but there was a certain indescribable joy in landing a jump after trying hundreds of failed attempts.   

How has being a former competitive athlete prepared you for a career in law?

With all the work and travel involved, I was always reminded of the fact that the actual performance piece of the competition lasted only a couple of minutes. There were only a few hundred seconds to show the judges how hard I had been working in the months, even years, leading up to that moment.

And the performance itself was incredibly difficult. Landing a jump on an eighth of an inch of one blade is as physically as it is mentally exhausting. Even still, it showed me that the best way to perform well during those brief moments was to practice ad nauseam.

The same has applied to my practice of law. There is invariably less time to explain an area of law that may have taken hours to research and understand. But approaching that as a positive in the sense that you get an opportunity to showcase your work, albeit briefly, has helped me in the early stages of my career.

What lessons that you’ve learned from sports apply to how you work as a lawyer?

The most helpful lesson I’ve learned is that if you want to be good at something, then you need to throw yourself into it completely. You have to be willing to fall––and remain humble to ask for guidance when you do––if you want to develop a skill that actually impresses someone. But the pride of success is worth the time and pain spent.