Meet Miss New Jersey 2016: The pageant queen who never quit
At the Miss New Jersey competition, Brenna Weick has been something of a resident Susan Lucci.
It didn't start out that way. In fact, Weick, now headed for the 2017 Miss America competition in Atlantic City, had all the makings of the next Miss New Jersey seven years ago, when the Mantua Township teen won Miss New Jersey's Outstanding Teen and competed at the sister competition to the televised pageant, where she nearly won Miss America's Outstanding Teen.
"I'm a perfect example of how the program works," says Weick, 22, looking back on nearly a decade of pageants after completing a series of sprints, lunges and sit-ups at Training Aspects, a boutique gym in a strip mall in Voorhees, Camden County.
Weick finished her first attempt at Miss New Jersey in 2013 as runner-up to Cara McCollum, a Princeton University student from Arkansas who was new to the pageant scene. She pulled off a repeat performance the following year: first runner-up. Then, in 2015, she dropped one place to become second runner-up.
She wondered if she should just end her run for the crown.
"I knew that I wanted this, so I was not going to throw it away," says Weick, wearing a neon green tank top, her brown bangs clipped back after sweating it out in the gym (little more than two weeks remain before swimsuit competition). The fourth time proved to be the charm at the 2016 state competition in Ocean City this past June for Weick, who won as Miss Seashore Line.
Social media scrutiny
Weick attributes her win to a change in attitude. Her new personal mantra: "Accept and adapt." After she suffered a knee injury, Weick, who graduated in May from High Point University in North Carolina with a bachelor's degree in psychology, changed her pageant talent from dancing — she was a member of the college dance team — to singing (At Miss America, Weick, a soprano with a "Disney princess" voice, will be singing "Someone Like You" from the musical "Jekyll & Hyde").
"You're not going to be able to control everything," she says.
Recently Mantua Township announced it would honor Weick with a proclamation. Surveying the news on social media, Weick says she was dismayed to find a comment from a woman calling the dress she was wearing inappropriate.
The newly crowned queen will advance on to Miss America in September
"It's kind of crazy to me," she says, but also directly relates to her pageant platform — "A World of Difference: Navigating the Cybersphere," which she says is about recognizing the positive potential of social media as much as generating awareness about online bullying. To that point, she now mans the Miss New Jersey Twitter account but keeps her personal account private. "It can be a really scary place, the cybersphere," Weick says — but also an important tool for community.
Following the death of Cara McCollum, Miss New Jersey 2013, after a car accident in February, former Miss New Jersey contestants came together over social media to mourn the 24-year-old former pageant queen, a news anchor for SNJ Today in Millville. Weick, an aspiring investigative reporter, considered her a sister.
"We really leaned on each other a lot," says outgoing Miss New Jersey Lindsey Giannini, 22, another journalist hopeful who returns to Rowan University this fall. At this year's competition, contestants watched a slideshow memorializing McCollum.
"We were just holding each other," Weick says.
Miss New Jersey 2015 Lindsey Giannini crowns Brenna Weick Miss New Jersey 2016 in Ocean City this past June. (Tim Hawk | For NJ.com) Strong over skinny
Weick lives in Mantua with her parents, Robert, a senior technologist for Motorola, and Kelley, a hairdresser and former volunteer for the Miss Gloucester County pageant, and Zoey, their Yorkshire terrier. The Weicks, including Brenna's older brother Bob, a research specialist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, will be moving to their family summer home in Ocean City for pageant week.
"She's really big about worrying about herself and not competing with everyone else," Kelley Weick says of her daughter.
Cara McCollum, former Miss New Jersey and SNJ Today news anchor, died early Monday of injuries sustained in a Salem County crash a week earlier.
Brenna's boyfriend, Chris Grabert, 22, has been dating Weick since their senior year at Clearview Regional High School. Now a graduate student at the University of Central Florida, he'll be flying back home for the pageant. Though a Miss New Jersey hasn't taken the national title since 1984 — when Mays Landing's Suzette Charles had to sub in for Vanessa Williams following a nude photo scandal — Grabert thinks Weick is ready for the challenge.
"She's had four years to sharpen her skills," he says.
If Weick has an ace up her sleeve at Miss America, it may be her performance in "Lifestyle and Fitness in Swimsuit," since she got a nod for swimsuit in state preliminaries.
"Pound for pound Brenna will beat out the majority of guys when it comes to working out," says Kirill Vaks, her trainer of three years. Weick, who says she used to struggle with body image, lost five percent of her body fat but now weighs 10 pounds more, thanks to muscle gain. Yet the requisite bathing suits and heels often made Weick hide her pageant side.
Weick at the tail end of her pre-pageant workout. (Tim Hawk | For NJ.com)
"It puts a target on your back," she says. If Weick could choose, she'd pick fitness over bikinis. Still, the current trend of strong over "thin" has been translating to the pageant world — not only does Miss America's Outstanding Teen have a fitness routine instead of a swimsuit strut, but Miss Teen USA also dropped its swimsuit contest this year favor of athletic wear.
Weick considers the interview portion of the pageant her other strength. She turned down a job offer to become a production assistant at NBC 10 to wear the crown and says that if she won Miss America, she'd likely use the $50,000 scholarship to pursue a graduate degree in journalism.
"I always say no question is a bad question," Weick says, even after reigning Miss America, Betty Cantrell, then Miss Georgia, got thrown a polarizing curveball at last year's pageant with a question about Deflategate — "Legalities aside, did Tom Brady cheat?" (Yes, she answered, if there was a reason to suspect that he did.)
"It was kind of a funky question," Cantrell later said. "I'm not a football player and I really wasn't there to feel that ball to see if it was deflated."
Weick's assessment: "She owned that."
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2016/08/miss_new_jersey_2016_brenna_weick_miss_america_201.html
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