Julie Doss completes a gymnastics routine during practice for the Special Olympics World Games at the YMCA.

VALDOSTA — Julie Doss bounds across the mats of the YMCA Gymnastics floor. She performs flips, forward and backward, hand-stands. She works the uneven bars, twisting, leaping from one to the other.

Completing a series of acrobatics, Doss rises up, up, in the air before landing on the balls of her feet with a bounce.

“I’ve never seen her go that high,” said her mother, Jeanie Allen.

In January, Allen wasn’t certain Doss, 28, would be able to perform any of these moves again. Let alone soar to new heights.

Last fall, Doss underwent surgery. By the time she returned to practice on Feb. 1, Allen said Doss was weak from her recovery.

“She had no muscle mass,” Allen said. “No muscle at all, but once they said she could return to practice, she couldn’t be stopped.”

Doss had reason to return to practice. She has reason for practicing six sessions per week, for swimming often, for building back her stamina, her muscle mass, her ability to leap great distances in the air.

In late July, Doss will travel to Los Angeles to compete in gymnastics during the week-plus Special Olympics World Games. She is only one of seven athletes from Georgia to compete in the international games.

Allen has grown accustomed to her daughter’s indomitable will. She helped shape it.

Doss was a special-needs child. Allen, then Jeanie Doss, taught child and family development courses at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton.

Jeanie met Julie as a toddler. Jeanie and then-husband, the late Jimmy Doss, adopted Julie. She became little sister to the Dosses’ three sons, Jay, Jeremy and Jonathan.

Though Jeanie developed slowly, the Dosses never told the boys their sister was special needs.

“The best thing that could have happened to her is she came into a family with three brothers,” Allen said. “They didn’t cut her any slack. They treated her like anyone else.”

Young Julie underwent surgery. The family awaited a diagnosis for her slow development as a toddler. Doctors said it was Williams Syndrome.

Williams Syndrome is described as a genetic condition that can cause medical problems such as cardiovascular disease, developmental delays and learning disabilities.

With big brothers treating her as any sibling, from pushing her to do for herself and challenging her to keep up with her active, athletic brothers, Julie Doss developed a competitive drive that has continued into adulthood.

Her mother, brothers and step-father Larry Allen encourage her atheltic activities.

In recent weeks, while training for the World Games and despite only returning to the gym and pool a little more than three months earlier, Doss won awards for swimming in the state’s Special Olympics Summer Games. She won a gold medal in the 25 butterfly and a silver medal for the individual medley.

As for the upcoming Special Olympics World Games, Doss said she is excited to participate, to compete and will do her best to win a medal.

She takes her work-outs seriously but she repeatedly smiles while YMCA Gymnastics trainer Jane Walsh tasks her through one of her private practice sessions.

“I’m excited to be going,” Doss said, before again leaping into action, bounding hand over feet, literally head over heels, across the mats.

Anyone wanting to wish Julie Doss well on her preparations for the Special Olympics World Games, scheduled for July 25 through Aug. 2, in Los Angeles, may write her at: Julie Doss, P.O. Box 62,  Lake Park, Ga. 31636. Her mother, Jeanie Allen, encourages all letters and notes of encouragement.