Courtney Bumpers Grande chuckles slightly when she starts to describe her current job. The former standout Tar Heel gymnast is a little apologetic.

“Even when I try to describe it to other attorneys,” she says, “their usual response is, ‘You just went a little bit over my head.’”

Grande is an attorney in Franklin, Tenn., where she works for Community Health Systems as the senior corporate counsel for managed care. Exactly what that entails is not entirely important, other than to know that the detail-oriented personality that made her so excellent as a gymnast also feeds her passion for the law.

It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been 15 years since she was competing for the Tar Heels; at least one routine still lives on YouTube and is a constant testimony that Courtney Bumpers Grande is most likely the greatest gymnast in Carolina history. Originally from Stone Mountain, Ga., she scored a perfect 10.0 on the floor exercise in the fourth meet of her Tar Heel career and continued that excellence for all four years.

She finished fourth on the balance beam at the NCAA Championships as a freshman, then won the individual floor exercise national championship as a sophomore by scoring 9.9375. How could she get better? She won the floor championship again as a junior, this time with a perfect ten.

That excellence fit in perfectly with the other women’s sports at Carolina. Grande was at Carolina when the women’s soccer program won a national title, field hockey was consistently on the doorstep of a championship, and women’s lacrosse was in the infancy of what has become a perennial national contender.

“There’s an expectation at Carolina that everyone is going to be good,” Grande says. “I don’t think Carolina wants to be known as a school that has one or two good sports. Carolina is about being an athletically and academically well-rounded university that provides wonderful opportunities to everybody.”

Even when Grande was racking up championship level scores for the Tar Heels, she knew she had other passions outside of gymnastics. She’s the rare college student-athlete who expressed an interest in the law while she was in school, followed through by attending law school at Penn, and then pursued it professionally.

Although it sounds challenging to blend two demanding disciplines, Grande found that it came naturally.

“My entire life, I was balancing academics and gymnastics,” she says. “Gymnastics is unique because before you ever get to college, you’re already used to practicing a large number of hours when you were younger. But the NCAA limits practice hours in college, so you actually end up practicing fewer hours when you get to college.”

That gave her plenty of time to accumulate the grades and resume necessary for an Ivy League graduate school, and her good work at Penn landed her a job as a federal prosecutor in Charlotte before transitioning to her current corporate role.

Grande doesn’t have as much time for gymnastics currently, because she’s balancing her job with an active family that includes a four-year-old son and an eight-month-old daughter. They’re just starting to get into sports, and eventually they’re likely to discover their mother paved a path for them that proves it’s possible to combine almost anything with an athletic career.

And one of the first things she’s likely to tell them: it all started in Chapel Hill.

“When I think of my time at Carolina, the first thing that comes to mind is opportunity,” she says. “I had wonderful opportunities to grow as an athlete. I had wonderful opportunities in academics. I had a pretty narrow major, and Carolina had an outstanding school of public health where I could take classes as an undergrad. There’s an opportunity to be successful in so many different ways.”