Team Zero Was the Key to Clemson’s First-Season Success

On June 17, 2021, Clemson announced it was adding a gymnastics team that would start competing during the 2024 season. At the time, that date seemed far away, but since then, the program has found its coach, its team, and its expectations. Less than three years since that June day, the Tigers have made it to the postseason in the first year of competition

And that is just the beginning.

It took Clemson about a year to hire its head coach, Amy Smith, but once she was in her new role, the program was ready to build toward making a competitive debut. Smith wanted to start the first season strong, and to do that, she leveraged the transfer portal and strong recruiting to bring in a blend of experience levels. Gymnasts wanted to be a part of that strong culture, which is what drew Lilly Lippeatt to Clemson. 

“I wanted a culture that was going to be a really strong and good foundation in terms of the person that I would be versus just the score that I would get,” she said.

But the culture wasn’t built overnight. It start with “Team Zero,” the name given to the gymnasts who arrived on campus a year in advance of the Tigers’ inaugural season. Culturally, being together without competition allowed the team to grow the internal leadership and build character. “Culture ultimately makes or breaks a team,” Smith said.

In this case, the culture made the team. The determination to be a strong from the start and make regionals year one led to a big push in difficulty in the gym. The gymnasts knew the talk on the outside about not having the 10.0 start value vaults and worked to fix that. Molly Arnold and Madison Minner spent year zero learning Yurchenko one and a halves, and Lauren Rutherford re-learned hers in the preseason. Those upgrades showed up during the season and contributed to Clemson being the ranked No. 26 in the country on the event.

While the Tigers made the postseason as a first-year program, the season did not end the way Clemson had hoped. The gymnasts knew that the team was capable of making it to day two, and that will be the expectation for next season. Even with the disappointing result, though, the support of the Clemson fans is strong. The Tigers filled the stands all season with over 8,600 attendees each meet and have already sold 5,000 season tickets for 2025.

“I don’t know how the Clemson community does it, but they show out every single time,” Lippeatt said. “We love them for it, and we always show them gratitude.”

College gymnastics isn’t just new to Clemson but to the state of South Carolina, too. You’d never know it, though, with how Tiger home meets have rivaled even the top schools in the country in terms of crowd size and environment.

Clemson is a living example of how a school can add a gymnastics team and be successful without years of building.

“Gymnastics is a great sport, and I hope more schools get inspired in seeing what we did and say, ‘Yeah, we wanna be a part of that.'”

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Article by Alyssa Van Aauker