Fisk University, the first historically Black college and university (HBCU) to have a college gymnastics team, will host a meet on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day featuring all six teams in the country that have Black female head coaches. The meet is being held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, which offered to host after Fisk officials approached them about holding the event in a larger arena than Fisk’s. Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gym can hold more than 14,000 fans; Fisk’s facility, while also in Nashville, can hold only about a tenth of that number.
Fisk and Talladega State University in Alabama, the second HBCU to start a gymnastics team, will be competing alongside teams from Rutgers University, Brown University, the University of William & Mary, and Iowa State University. All six head coaches will participate in a panel discussion before the meet about diversity and equity in women’s gymnastics.
“It’s a milestone for college gymnastics,” said Umme Salim-Beasley, head coach at Rutgers. “This is a pioneer moment.”
“I never thought it would happen,” said Kelsey Hinton, head coach at William & Mary. “I’m not gonna lie.”
The meet was the brainchild of Corrinne Tarver, the head coach at Fisk, who began the first HBCU program in the country from scratch. Fisk’s team debuted in the 2023 season. Tarver reached out to the other five women after a coaching conference to pitch them the idea. “And every one of them immediately said yes,” Tarver said.
As Ashley Miles Greig, who just began her head coaching career this season with Iowa State, noted, Tarver’s life is full of historic moments. Tarver was the first Black gymnast to compete at the University of Georgia, the first Black gymnast to win the NCAA national all-around title, and the first head coach of an HBCU gymnastics team. “Her life is basically history,” Miles Greig said.
For her part, Tarver is humble about her history. “I don’t do things thinking, oh, I’m going to make history again,” Tarver said. “It was just an idea, a brainchild and something that I felt passionate about and I was blessed that the other coaches felt passionate about it as well.”
But most of these coaches say the groundwork for the meet was laid even earlier, by Derrin Moore, who runs the advocacy group Brown Girls Do Gymnastics. Moore had pushed HBCUs to start gymnastics teams from the time she launched Brown Girls Do Gymnastics as an Instagram account in 2015. A petition started by Brown Girls Do Gymnastics in 2020 to urge HBCUs to form gymnastics teams has more than 24,000 signatures to date. The organization helped recruit Tarver to Fisk and Aja Sims-Fletcher to Talladega College in Alabama, the second HBCU in as many years to introduce a gymnastics program. And it is not an exaggeration to say that among Black female gymnastics coaches, all roads lead to Derrin Moore and Brown Girls Do Gymnastics; Salim-Beasley sits on the advisory council for Brown Girls Do Gymnastics, and most of her fellow coaches have participated in the group’s conferences or camps.
Moore, a former gymnast and current club coach, says just the mention of the MLK Day invitation meet gives her goosebumps.
“Thirty years ago, everyone would have laughed or said, oh, Black people don’t do that,” Moore said. “It’s super significant.”
Salim-Beasley, who competed for West Virginia and graduated in 1998, agreed, noting that the prominence of Black elite gymnasts in recent years has bolstered the recruiting pool for college gymnastics and increased the options for gymnasts of color who want to continue competing in college.
“I think the elite world really brought a lot of recognition towards what Black gymnasts are able to accomplish in the world scene, which also allowed those young moms out there to say, ‘Hey, you know, gymnastics is a sport that I can put my daughter in and she’s going to be accepted,'” Salim-Beasley said. “That was not the mindset when I was coming out of high school and exploring college options and talking to HBCUs and kind of getting laughed at because they didn’t feel as though gymnastics [was] a sport for Black people.”
Tarver approached Vanderbilt about hosting and they committed early on. She needed the space, but beyond the size of the facility, she hoped for the opportunity to draw a different crowd to the sport. “That’s something I hope, is that the schools [where Fisk competes], we get people excited about coming out to meets more often,” Tarver said, noting that during her inaugural season, Fisk’s presence often sold out their competitors’ facilities or brought in a record crowd.
“Vanderbilt is honored and excited to collaborate with our friends at Fisk University for this historic meet at Memorial Gymnasium. Bringing together six trailblazing head coaches dedicated to lifting up young people honors the spirit of a day of service. And as we celebrate Dr. King’s legacy and commitment to create the future we want for the next generation, these student-athletes embody the combination of athletic excellence and the power of higher education to change lives. Fisk’s gymnastics program is an inspiration to me and all of us in the Nashville and college sports communities, and I’m so pleased to support Coach Corrinne Tarver in making this event a reality. We are proud to welcome these teams to Vanderbilt,” said Vanderbilt athletic director Dr. Candice Storey Lee.
Tarver said that it is her hope that the MLK Day invitational meet becomes an annual event.
Hinton noted that MLK Day this year falls on January 15 — what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 95th birthday. “I’ve never competed on MLK Day,” she said. “So just to be able to have my athletes compete on such a special day, and to have these Black female coaches who may not have had this opportunity before to be honored on that day, is huge.”
Salim-Beasley is the veteran of the coaches, with nine years as a head coach under her belt (three at Temple, and heading into her sixth season in New Brunswick). Hinton has been a head coach for five years, all at William & Mary; Brittany Harris is entering her second season at Brown and third season as a head coach, having spent the 2022 season at Centenary College.
For Sims-Fletcher at Talladega and Miles Greig at Iowa State University, this meet will be just the second in each of their head coaching careers. But Sims-Fletcher, hired last year to create just the second HBCU gymnastics program in history from scratch, is taking it all in stride. “The fact that it’s a big stage doesn’t really mean a ton for us,” Sims-Fletcher said. “It’s really just the opportunity to be out there.” Sims-Fletcher said that her team has used the hashtag #BTU, meaning “Bigger Than Us,” all season, and that the motto applies to the MLK Day meet as well.
The idea that the sum of the meet is bigger than its parts resonated strongly in the words of all six coaches.
“We are competitors, right? That’s the whole point, but there’s another level,” Miles Greig said. “We all want to perform. We all want to do a good job and give our teams an opportunity to showcase what they’ve been doing, but that kind of takes a backseat to this,” she said.
All six coaches spoke warmly of the friendship between them, as well as between their respective team members.
“Nothing really brings people together like sports,” said Harris.
Miles Greig said, “We all benefit when everybody has a seat at the table.”
The invitational meet will be the second time that the two HBCU teams will compete against one another, after Fisk’s and Talladega’s first meeting three days prior at Florida. “I honestly didn’t think it would happen so quickly,” Tarver said about seeing a second program start up a year after her own. Fisk’s team this year is deeper than it was in their debut season, she said, and healthier to boot. Tarver said that after the pressure put on the team leading into their first season, she has tried to impart upon them the importance of playing the long game, gymnastically speaking: Holding back on difficulty a bit and ramping up throughout the season.
Talladega’s floor choreography, Sims-Fletcher said, is something audiences should look out for. The team has not yet put up any full routines on social media because they want to debut their work on meet day. “There is something special about HBCU floor routines. I think they’re going to be showstoppers,” Sims-Fletcher said.
Her young team, she said, doesn’t know what they don’t know. “It is going to be really special to see their reactions when they finally walk into the arena,” Sims-Fletcher said.
“It’s really cool to be a witness to Fisk and Talladega and these two new programs paving the way for the future,” Harris said. She harkened back to her own childhood. “Little Brittany, it warms her heart to see wow, the team full of women of color and they’re doing gymnastics.”
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Article by Lela Moore
This was almost a great article. To not know the correct name of a college and especially one that has made history is extremely disappointing and highly disrespectful to the College themselves. It is Talladega College. Its’s the first HBCU in the state of Alabama which holds the Amistad murals and is the history of this institution. Please put some respect on their name. You have interviewed them enough to know their names. I feel like yall tolerate Talladega. There is no respect. The last article that you all did, you posted it up on Instagram and did not tag Coach Aja or Talladega Gymnastics. You only tagged Coach Tarver, Fisk Gymnastics, and Brown Girls Do Gymnastics. Yet, the article was about BOTH HBCU’s. Furthermore, In this article, you put that it was their first time meeting which is also incorrect. They just met at the January 12 University of Florida meet in which Fisk only beat them by 2 points. It is highly disrespectful that you incorrectly report an institution’s name. When u report on something, it’s perceived as if you are interested. Act like it.
Thanks for reaching out and bringing these to our attention! You’re absolutely right that those mistakes with Talladega’s school name and the first meeting are inexcusable and should have been caught when editing and before publishing. Please let us know if you have any more comments or concerns. We are always happy to respond to respectful feedback.