‘She had the biggest heart’: Beloved NC coach, single mom, cancer survivor dies of COVID
As co-owner of Charlotte Allstar Gymnastics and Cheerleading, Julie O’Brien dedicated her life to trying to turn as many young athletes as possible into better but also more loving people.
And in the process, she also managed to help a grown man become a better and more loving person.
That would be her friend and fellow coach Kevin Brubaker, who opened the Matthews gym with O’Brien in 1991. He explains:
“If a kid was frustrating, I was a harsher coach in my earlier years. If someone left our gym, I was like, ‘Good riddance. Let’s be done with them,’ and Julie, she used to say to me —” Brubaker pauses for just a beat, his voice breaking — “she’s like, ‘Don’t you want to have a gym where everybody feels welcome, all the time? ... I mean, we spit on Jesus and we curse God and we get frustrated, but Jesus takes us back unconditionally every single day and wants to be our best friend.’
“She said, ‘That’s what our gym needs to be about: We need to unconditionally love kids and take them back.’ It took me 10 years to learn that from her. Now we’re on the same page with that. And I am such a better husband and a better dad and a way better coach and a better person because of my 32-year friendship with Julie.”
A single mother of two teenagers and the survivor of Stage 4 uterine cancer five years ago, O’Brien died shortly after midnight on Tuesday morning of a heart attack in a Matthews ICU, ending a weeks-long battle with COVID. She was 59.
‘We just hit it off right away’
Julia “Julie” Elizabeth O’Brien was born at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, on Feb. 23, 1962, right at the tail end of the Baby Boom.
Her family moved to Arkansas for a couple years, then to Tulsa, Okla., by which time she was in middle school and had two siblings: sister Jeralyn Dee, about four years younger, and brother John, about six years younger.
While attending Jenks High School, and with her mom a respected gymnastics judge, Julie blossomed into an elite gymnast — good enough that she earned a scholarship to compete for the gymnastics team in her hometown at Oral Roberts University, which at the time had an NCAA Division I program.
But she blew out her knee as a freshman, and her athletic career came to a premature end. So she decided to turn her longterm focus to coaching. After graduating from ORU at the top of her class, she headed for Houston, where she took a job at the Cypress Academy of Gymnastics.
She moved from there to Charlotte to take a coaching position at the old Weyandt’s Gymnastics facility on Monroe Road. It was there that she first crossed paths with Brubaker, who was also a recent hire. They met when she was 27 and he was a 22-year-old graduate school student at UNC Charlotte.
“We just hit it off right away,” he recalls. “I mean, probably the biggest thing was she has really strong morals and values. She went to a Christian college, and her faith is one of the biggest things that defined Julie. She loved Jesus first and foremost, in every aspect of what she did. ... I grew up in a Christian home, my father was a pastor for 50 years — but I was not near as nice as Julie.”
Though Brubaker also had a gymnastics background, he had switched to cheerleading in college, and would go on to cheer throughout graduate school. As they grew closer, she would frequently accept his invitations to come see him and the rest of the squad perform during 49ers basketball games.
“And she started to really gravitate towards cheer because of the team camaraderie,” he says. “Julie loved the relationships and the friendships. Not that you don’t get that in gymnastics, but it’s more an individual sport when you compete. She liked the team concept of, you know, everyone’s on the floor and it takes everyone to do this pyramid, or do these partner stunts. She loved the reliance on each other.”
Before long, the two twentysomethings had hatched a plan to defect from Weyandt’s.
It started with a jackhammer
Today, Charlotte Allstar Gymnastics and Cheerleading serves about 1,100 youth athletes.
When they left Weyandt’s to start their own gym in the spring of 1991, however, the possibility that they could become that big never occurred to them.
They were going to be happy just to open, period.
In the interest of keeping costs down, O’Brien, Brubaker and a third business partner, Eric Singer, recruited people from their church communities to take turns using a jackhammer to break up the concrete where they planned to dig out the pits (which hold the soft foam blocks used to cushion landings or falls); then he used a backhoe to get them fully dug out while she moved all the dirt with a Bobcat skid-steer loader.
It took two months to do the work themselves to get the facility ready.
When they opened that fall, Brubaker handled the cheerleading part of the business, O’Brien took care of preschool gymnastics, and Singer ran the girls’ gymnastics programs until he parted ways with the gym a few years later.
Brubaker says in the beginning they “were just hoping to pay our bills, just hoping to affect a couple kids. Hoping to be able to love on some families through these sports that we love.”
The two developed a national reputation over the years. Together, for instance, they started a series of cheerleading competitions that they called CheerSport, which they eventually sold to Varsity Spirit, the most powerful company in the sport.
But she also deserves sole credit for certain things, Brubaker says.
For one, the CheerSport name was her idea. She also wrote the original rules that were adopted across the sport of All-Star Cheerleading. And she came away from a fight with uterine cancer in 2016 the victor, much to the delight — and relief — of friends and family who were afraid the Stage 4 diagnosis might be a death sentence.
Her most successful solo project, though? Her kids.
Creating a family on her own
O’Brien was never married. In fact, she never really even dated anyone, Brubaker says. She was just too busy with the gym, too naturally introverted, and not really interested in online dating.
She was, however, growing increasingly interested in raising children as she moved through the second half of her 30s.
Through prayer, she felt like God was leading her to adopt, Brubaker says, and through someone she knew at her church, she was turned on to an agency in Guatemala. That’s eventually how, in 2002, she became a single mother to a baby boy she named Nathan.
“And I remember when she came back from Guatemala, it was like the next day she started talking about a second one,” Brubaker recalls, chuckling. Friends and family encouraged her to take things slowly. She did. It was another five years before O’Brien went to China with her brother John to bring home Shayla, a 3-1/2 year old girl with a cleft palate that would take multiple surgeries to fix.
They became her everything.
“Shayla and her were best friends,” says Lisa Foy, one of O’Brien’s closest friends, a former cheer mom who met O’Brien 19 years ago when her daughter was an athlete at the gym. “They knew each other backwards and forwards. And Nathan, he was into the superheroes, and anything that he was into she would go 100 percent and learn everything there was about it. They loved going to movies together.”
Basically, Foy says, “Julie would do anything for her kids.”
Nathan, 19, is studying audio and video engineering at Central Piedmont Community College. Shayla, 17, is a student at Queen’s Grant Community School in Mint Hill and is a cheerleader and coach at Charlotte Allstar.
Both of them are known for smiling a lot — something everyone agrees they got from their mom.
A rollercoaster in the hospital
O’Brien came down with COVID the last week in July. Nathan contracted it, too.
But only she developed symptoms that were concerning. She said she just was really tired, her brother John says, and eventually she was feeling run down enough that he encouraged her to see a doctor.
On July 27, she drove herself to Novant Health Matthews Medical Center. Two days later, she was on a ventilator.
For the next three weeks, she lay in a hospital bed in the ICU basically in a coma. Then on Aug. 17, the hospital staff set up a camera that would allow her family to see her via a Zoom call. She would still be unconscious, but they’d be able to talk to her and the audio would be piped into the room.
Then, a pleasant surprise:
“The nurses and doctors were like, ‘It’s almost like a miracle — we rolled the camera in, she opened her eyes and smiled,’” John O’Brien says. “They’re like, ‘Wow, we did not expect this.’ So I called in ... and was talking to her and she was moving her head. All she could really do is blink and nod yes and no. But she was definitely conscious and coherent.”
On Aug. 18, family members — including her son and daughter — were allowed to visit in person for the first time since she was admitted. On Aug. 19, doctors were able to remove her from the ventilator.
“And everything seemed to be getting better,” John says. “She’d be able to squeeze your hand a little bit.”
They were able to spend time with her last Friday, last Saturday, last Sunday and this past Monday. As soon as she saw her daughter or her son walk into the room, Julie’s eyes would light up. The family began to make plans for her rehabilitation. Confidence was growing steadily.
Right before she got sick, Foy says, “She had started working out, eating healthy, and she had lost weight, so she was in better shape than she was when she had the cancer. So I really thought that she would be able to beat this.”
But on Monday, she made a terrible turn. Her kidneys were starting to malfunction, so doctors were looking into getting her on dialysis. Then her breathing became significantly labored, so there was talk of putting her back on the ventilator that night.
Around 11:30 p.m., she had a heart attack. Less than an hour later, she was gone.
‘It’s just a win for the heaven team’
“As the doctors explained, COVID is a tricky thing,” John O’Brien says. “You think you’re getting better, and then it hits you again. It comes from another angle. I mean, it just doesn’t stop.”
He says his sister was not vaccinated.
“We had talked about that ... and I assumed she went and did. And she didn’t.”
“That’s kind of the word that I would love to get out to people about the vaccine. You may still get COVID — I know a lot of people that got the vaccination and they got COVID, and they are fine. It’s not that it’s gonna make it so you never get it. But it’s gonna make it so you don’t end up like my sister. Hopefully. I mean, we can’t say that definitively because we don’t know what the next strain’s gonna do, but ... right now, it’s the best thing you can do.”
But more than anything else, her family and closest friends want to get the word out about how special Julie O’Brien was, and how much she’ll be missed.
“She’s the type of person who would give you the shirt off her back. I mean, just so caring,” John says as he fights back tears.
“Julie had the biggest heart,” Foy says, her voice quavering, “for everybody she met.”
Adds Brubaker: “There’s a lot of happy people in heaven right now. You know, it’s like, when you get Julie to heaven, it’s just a win for the heaven team because she’s just ... the kindest ... the sweetest ... the most loving.
“Julie loved. Exclamation point. And you don’t need to put anything else after that.”
How to celebrate — and help
There will be a celebration of life for Julie O’Brien at 6 p.m. on Sunday at Forest Hill Church, 7224 Park Road in Charlotte. The announcement reads: “Please do not feel the need to wear black. Julie would want you to wear whatever makes you feel happy!”
A GoFundMe campaign has been started to help support her family. Details: https://bit.ly/3zpajmO.
This story was originally published August 27, 2021 at 5:53 PM with the headline "‘She had the biggest heart’: Beloved NC coach, single mom, cancer survivor dies of COVID."
