As we enter the 2025 season, we’re getting ready for the final cohort of COVID-year athletes. The NCAA allowed an extra year of eligibility for all 2021 winter athletes to account for teams and individuals who opted out of the 2021 season. Gymnasts have already been able to take a COVID year in the 2022, 2023, and 2024 seasons, resulting in thousands of routines from athletes who chose to extend their collegiate careers.
While athletes can stay on longer, the number of routines in each meet hasn’t changed. We found that over the last three seasons, fifth-year gymnasts have made nearly 5,000 lineup appearances. Has this resulted in underclassmen making fewer appearances?
Who did we consider to be a fifth year?
We used the cohort of fifth-year athletes that we previously identified in our previous Data Deep Dive, “Unpacking the Success of Fifth-Year Gymnasts”: including gymnasts in their second or third senior seasons in Road to Nationals rosters as well as gymnasts included in College Gym News’s 2022, 2023, and 2024 tracking articles as returning for a fifth year. For non-fifth years, we used class years in Road to Nationals rosters.
Throughout this analysis, we look at the percentage of lineup appearances by class year to account for changing number of routines that are completed each season.
Have underclassmen competed less frequently in the era of COVID-year eligibility?
We tallied the number of routines throughout each season by underclassmen (freshmen and sophomores) and upperclassmen (juniors, seniors, and fifth years), then calculated the percent of lineup appearances by each group.
From 2017 through 2021, underclassmen and upperclassmen both accounted for 50% of routines, although each group’s percentage fluctuated annually. The largest gap between the two groups during this time period came in 2019, when underclassmen competed in 48% of lineup spots and upperclassmen 52%, a difference of five percentage points.
From 2022 through 2024, when gymnasts were able to stay on for a COVID-year, underclassmen accounted for 47% of routines, six percentage points lower than upperclassmen. In 2022, the 49%-51% split was similar to previous years, followed by a larger gap of 47%-53% in 2023. A wider divide came in 2024: underclassmen made up 45% of lineup appearances and upperclassmen made up 55% of appearances.
The narrower gaps between the groups prior to 2023 could be due to a number of different situations that affect team lineups: a strong or large recruiting class could take more lineup spots as they start as underclassmen and move through class years together, or a coaching change could result in transfers or changes in recruit commitments. The ten percentage point gap, however, seems due to fifth-year gymnasts making lineups more frequently in 2024 than in the previous two seasons.
To find out if fifth years’ lineup appearances accounted for this increase, we disaggregated each class year’s percentage of routines in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Although the distribution of routines shuffled each season, routines by fifth years increased from six percent of all routines in 2022 and 2023 to nine percent in 2024.
Between 2022 and 2023, freshmen lineup appearances dropped by seven percentage points, from 27% of routines in 2022 to 20% in 2023. Routines by juniors and seniors increased by just two percentage points, while fifth years competed the same share of routines in both years. The decrease in the freshmen’s share of routines was impacted primarily by the 2023 sophomore class.
The star-studded recruit class who joined the NCAA in 2022 contributed the same 27% share of routines as 2022 freshmen and as 2023 sophomores. In 2022, Grace McCallum led the freshmen class in lineup appearances with 61 routines, followed by Air Force’s Genevieve Sabado (60) and Ayla McKean (59), and Sunisa Lee (59). In 2023, Jordan Bowers appeared most frequently, contributing 64 routines, followed by Aleah Finnegan (60), Madelyn Williams (59), and Leanne Wong (58).
Although the 2023 freshmen seemed to lose lineup spots to the 2023 sophomores, in 2024, these cohorts saw more parity in appearances, making up 23% of routines as sophomores and 24% of routines as juniors.
Next, we considered that some teams did not have any fifth-year athletes on their rosters. Some teams were unable to offer athletes a fifth year of eligibility, including all teams in the Ivy League, while other teams may have not had any gymnasts who chose to extend their collegiate career. We wanted to see if the distributions differed between teams with at least one fifth-year gymnast on their roster and teams without any fifth years.
Unsurprisingly, we found that underclassmen competed a lower percentage of routines on teams with fifth-year athletes. As seen above, fifth years represented a greater share of routines in 2024 than in 2022 and 2023. This matches the pattern found here: underclassmen competed in 45% of routines in 2022, 44% in 2023, and 41% in 2024.
On teams without fifth-year athletes, the share of lineup appearances by underclassmen increased by more than ten percentage points, from 52% of routines in 2022 to 63% of routines in 2024.
Looking Ahead to 2025
As the 2021 freshman class enters its fifth-year season, the final season of COVID-year eligibility, CGN has tracked nearly 100 gymnasts who have announced their plans to take a fifth year. The 2022 freshman cohort will enter its senior season; its last season of eligibility. Although these freshmen came into their collegiate years with experienced fifth-year gymnasts competing for the same lineup spots, we found that they contributed a high share of routines, especially as underclassmen. On the other hand, the 2023 and 2024 underclassmen have made fewer lineup appearances than underclassmen have historically made. It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out in 2025, when both the 2021 and 2022 freshmen cohorts compete in their final seasons. Teams will not have a fifth-year cohort to bolster lineups in 2026, so it might become more important for underclassmen to gain experience in 2025 in preparation of filling those gaps.
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Article by Jill Walsh
