For many sports fans, November in Ontario is when sports calendars start filling up, from Hockey Night in Canada to university rivalry matches. The same is true for gymnastics, with Tour Selection kicking off the season’s competition schedule. Serving as the precursor to the regular season, a strong showing this early in the year is often a good indicator for the upcoming season. Additionally, athletes that place in the top eight in their optional level earn a spot on Team Ontario’s tour team and will get the opportunity to compete at a major club meet in the United States. Whether a tour gymnast has never heard of NCAA gymnastics, or is an avid Friday Night Heights fan, this is often their first step on the path to potentially making rosters on collegiate teams.
This year, Tour Selection was held from November 6th to 8th and the athletes named to Team Ontario’s roster will travel to the Simone Biles Invitational in late January 2025. Tour Selection also kicked off a long six-month stretch for the level 10s in Ontario, who balance their competitive seasons with collegiate recruiting efforts.
After the tour is the grind of Ontario’s four month long regular season, where athletes balance training and college outreach. The schedule can be difficult, with college camp weekends and competitions often happening back to back.
In 2024, Natasha Lopez won the Senior C level 10 all-around title at the Arizona Grand Invitational, where Team Ontario toured. With five of her tour teammates on that 2024 team of eight now freshmen in the NCAA (and another two signed), competitions like this have a proven record of helping Ontario’s gymnasts reach their goals of competing for college teams. Now representing Shenderey Gymnastics – known to college gym fans for their bars technique and floor artistry – Lopez was her club’s lone representative at Tour Selection this month. Nabbing the level 10 title in the all-around with a dominant showing on vault and bars, her 37.017 serves her in two ways: she earned a ticket to the Simone Biles Invitational and cemented a truly impressive score to begin her gap year campaign.
For Lopez, the timing of visiting colleges can be difficult to balance alongside resting and her weekly training commitments, even before adding her competition schedule to the mix. She’s currently in talks with colleges throughout the United States, but her available time is limited: attending a single-day visit or training camp can grow into a minimum three day commitment. “It’s not that you can’t get noticed, it’s just it makes it more difficult,” she says, factoring in visits with Gymnastics Ontario’s rigid scheduling.
Vicki May, who works as a recruiting consultant for many Canadian gymnasts, attests to the distances the majority of Canadian recruits need to travel to be seen. Gymnasts that live in southern Ontario average a full day’s driving distance to a handful of midwestern college teams, encompassing the MAC, MIC, WIAC, and Big Ten. This rules out many western and southern schools and their clinics, as the costs of attending a weekend camp far outweigh the benefits. In her experience, gymnasts who can easily reach American cities such as Detroit and Buffalo have easier access to a variety of colleges, because they can fly domestically from those cities. Conversely, athletes from northern clubs in more remote areas of the province are hours or days of commuting away from potential universities, isolating them further from networking opportunities at college camps.
Amy Robins shares that her coaches at Rose City Gymnastics Club are always supportive of their gymnasts attending college camps, making the most of their proximity to the American midwest from Windsor.
“In the past I have combined camps with visiting school campuses to maximize the travel and gain exposure to different colleges. Fall clinics are typically around the time we start putting routines together, so they are really helpful to gain feedback on our routines before the season starts a few weeks later.”
Her exposure to NCAA gymnastics goes beyond her club’s previous commits – including Yale alumni Lindsay Chia – and is tied to her proximity to the midwest D1 teams. Campus visits across Big Ten and MAC teams are significantly closer to Robins than many Ontarians For example, she was able to take a quick hour-long drive to Ann Arbor to watch NCAA Regionals. For Robins, seeing postseason action live was “beyond inspiring…in the midst of my recruiting process”.
The regular season for Ontario’s level 10s works the same as it would in the United States, with the province having fully phased in the DP code of points over the last decade. However, Gymnastics Ontario still uses its own Technical Regulations to govern how meets and selections are run. The system accounts for a maximum of three all-around scores attained in province, dropping the third, and averaging the top two from each gymnasts’ qualifying meets.
During the regular season, some clubs may choose to compete at invitationals in the United States to allow their gymnasts even more exposure to scoring opportunities and scouts. Robins relishes each opportunity she has to compete over the border, citing how laid back the competition atmosphere is. The biggest difference to her is the set up: “I’ve found that the majority of the meets I’ve gone to in the states are in big arenas, whereas most of our level 10 meets, aside from provincials, easterns, and nationals, are hosted in club gyms. That means the landings are usually a bit harder and we prepare for that accordingly in the gym.”
She’s also aware of scoring discrepancies between American and Canadian competitions, with scoring trending higher when she competes internationally. “It is nice to have those American scores as a more accurate checkpoint to see where I compare to my American level 10 peers.” Since the province has much tougher judges than those in the United States, scores without context can make the recruiting process more difficult for many of Ontario’s gymnasts.
For Lopez, communicating this with college coaches has been vital to her recruiting process. While many D1 college coaches are using a score of 38 in the all around as a benchmark for scholarships, Lopez candidly shares how rare that is in the province, and certainly not for lack of trying. Notching a 37 in Ontario is rare; its level 10 scoring ranges mirror D3 rather than DP. To provide more context, Lopez consistently sends video updates along with the meet scores provided to college coaches, highlighting her array of reliable 10.0 start value compositions.
“They do a really good job of making sure you have the base routine first, but then also allowing you to train additional skills,” she says, citing the Ray she trains consistently as an example. Chris Hanley, one of her club coaches at Shenderey, makes a point of “not just doing the bare minimum of level 10,” highlighting that single bar releases and complex dismounts help his athletes stand out. While Lopez has traditionally been a strong gymnast on bars for years, her work with Hanley has gained attention from college coaches. Given the depth that strong vaulters and beam workers can often carry over to floor when being recruited, Hanley believes “it always comes down to bars.”
For a short gap in college over the winter holidays, some gymnasts choose to return home to Ontario to visit family and friends. A stop by at the gym from current college athletes is often an event to look forward to for club gymnasts, especially for athletes who hope to compete in the NCAA. For Breanna Ho, college decisions were heavily influenced by her network of teammates at Gemini Gymnastics. Though her club has strong ties to Stanford in former elite names such as Natalie Vaculik, Aleeza Yu, and Ava Sorrento, she affirms “it was also thanks to other Gemini alumni that I learned about the more nontraditional paths to NCAA athletics, from Shayla Bolduc introducing me to Acro & Tumbling at Alderson Broaddus, to Cora Geiger giving the head coach Becki Rolbecki my contact info at Winona. Overall, asking other Gemini girls about their experiences in the NCAA helped me decide where I would find my best fit, what my priorities were, and what things to look for in a program.”
The sentiment is echoed by Shenderey’s level 10 gymnasts, including Lopez and teammate Chloe Callo. Shenderey is one of the few clubs in Ontario that have produced more than three collegiate gymnasts, even boasting All-Americans and post season qualifiers. Callo, who will graduate in 2026 after spending her entire club career at Shenderey, speaks highly of her experiences with the gym’s alumni. “They come back every summer and I find they come back more supportive because they’re now in a team rather than individually competing.”
Utah State sophomore Nyla Morabito credits the strong network of club alumni in the NCAA with her decision to pursue college gymnastics. After switching clubs to train under Kelly Manjak, she had two breakout seasons in level 10 following the Covid-19 lockdowns. “It definitely got me to where I wanted to be. Especially for my club career – my senior year I had the best year I’ve ever had. I’m very thankful for the coaches and the staff there. They’re amazing and I probably wouldn’t still be doing gymnastics without them,” she said.
Similarly, her Canada Winter Games teammates from 2023 all experienced the recruiting process together. While Manjak’s had its own contingent of recruitable gymnasts (with four on active college rosters), experiencing a multisport games with a team of gymnasts all being recruited at the same caliber was comforting.”We were all going through the recruiting process, or we were committed somewhere. All of us were going through the same thing and I think with it being my last year competing club gymnastics, I just wanted to go out and have fun and just enjoy the rest of the season,” Morabito said. She finished the regular season off with a dominant hold on the province’s level 10 rankings and swept the postseason’s all-around titles.
Come the first weekend of April, the postseason officially begins. Rather than using a qualifying score to name the athletes that will move further into the postseason, gymnasts in Ontario battle for a top six finish all around. Twenty four level 10 gymnasts will see their season continue as per the following breakdown, using rules that went into effect in 2022:
- L10 12-15 yrs 1st to 6th AA → Nationals
- L10 12-15 yrs 7th to 12th AA → Easterns
- L10 16+ 1st to 6th AA → Nationals
- L10 16+ 7th to 12th AA → Easterns
This age split is upheld across Canada and is used in alignment with FIG age grouping. Coincidentally, it also lines up with the age that gymnasts are allowed to contact college coaches. For example, a 16-year-old gymnast competing at nationals in May can begin contacting coaches in June, a few short weeks after they had the chance to see the athletes compete. While each province has its own qualification procedures to select their easterns, westerns, and nationals teams, the age distinction serves recruitable gymnasts nationwide.
In Ontario, dividing and conquering between Eastern Canadian Championships and Canadian Gymnastics Championships rather than sending the same team of six to both has been a major asset to the province’s recruiting prowess. Gymnasts that were on the cusp of nationals have one more level 10 assignment to vie for if they finish in the top 12. Conversely, nationals rewards the athletes who can be equally strong across all four events at provincials. NCAA specialist fan favorites and DIII mainstays have capped level 10 careers at easterns, including Ho. To her, having committed to Winona State before it was common for Ontario’s level 10s to attend training camps, competing for Team Ontario was the best way to “show your value” to college coaches.
All in all, Ontario’s gymnasts have spent years carving out their own opportunities in a recruiting space that was previously only chasing the top handful of Canadian elites. Willingness to film steady training updates, along with competing in the United States when feasible, gives gymnasts much needed exposure. According to Kerler, “It puts you on a level playing field when you have that advertisement of Canadian athletes,” and her club has the track record to prove it. Hanley picks up right where Kerler leaves off. “We’ve even had some kids like Hannah Scharf. [She] was the first Canadian gymnast to be at Arizona State, and now all of a sudden they’re signing Canadian after Canadian after Canadian.” The province’s gymnasts are incredibly grateful for media exposure, with the sentiment that third party media helps cast a wider recruiting net to connect with coaches. With the current wave of interest coming out of Ontario for collegiate gymnastics, there’s no doubt that its gymnasts will continue making names for themselves in the NCAA.
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Article by Peri Goodman
