Welcome to gymnastics season… kind of! The rankings don’t make sense! We can’t watch the meets! This is fun! There’s always a lot of mess in the first week of the season and a lot of discourse that is rapidly digested because we don’t have enough to do. (Stay tuned for my short-form breakdown of the discourse under “Comments.”) But there’s also spontaneity and fun surprises. Also bad surprises. It’s a mixed bag. Here’s what I’m watching, anticipating, and worrying about while I try to reconcile myself to the fact that this is actually season and not a weird dream.
Question: What was going through K.J. Kindler’s head when she set lineups this week?
Five all arounders. FIVE? I mean. Five of them?
I’m not mad about it if it was just an experiment. I’d also be wondering which events judges will choose to like Addison Fatta on. But there’s also other stuff on this roster I’d like to see eventually. Nobody uses their exact anticipated postseason lineups in week one, but most coaches err in the other direction and explore a few too many options, so this was a funny little aberration. If it becomes the real and established strategy, that will definitely be annoying, I just don’t think we’re there yet.
If I’m making the rules, Bowers and Torrez stay because they’re just common sense at this point, and Pederson has proven herself. Fatta can rotate events until we really establish what’s going to work well, and to me, this team has evolved past needing Audrey Davis leg events every week. I’m prepared to be disappointed on that point, though.
Bonus Questions:
Where did that meet come from? For every top team that struggles in the first week, there’s one that starts in midseason form and lands hilariously far up the rankings. Rutgers! Penn! Gustavus beat its 2024 opening score by FIVE points! These results may or may not mean anything in the long term, but for now, they’re a blast.
Anyone wanna…enter the transfer portal? During the offseason, I tend to get ahead of myself with training footage and dreams and convince myself that talented gymnasts who usually don’t make lineups will have a breakout season, and then in January when they still don’t make lineups, I’m disappointed. Everyone hates to see recruits they loved sitting on the bench year after year. Now, I didn’t ask them about their feelings. They could have minor lingering injuries. Maybe they do wish they were competing but it’s worth it for the great education they’re getting or they’re just enjoying training with their best friends in a good culture. But how about, for my entertainment alone, they transfer? It doesn’t even have to be a lower-ranked team: Sometimes a different environment or different coaches just bring something new out of an athlete. There’s probably a good reason they haven’t done this yet. I’m being selfish here. But… the transfer portal. It’s just a suggestion. Keep it in mind.
Comment: Let’s beat the horse one more time, it might not be fully dead yet.
This week was a great one for discourse points that, in typical gymternet fashion, we exhausted and then refused to move on from. I’m too tired of them to devote a whole section to any of them, but I’d feel neglectful pretending they didn’t happen, so I’m going to hit them all rapid-fire here.
The tighter judging was nice, but errors still happened. Scoring will almost certainly get looser as the season progresses—we rapidly forget how low most teams usually score in week one—but having no 10.0s for the first week since 2021 is still a big deal. We’ll see how this plays out. I don’t think the judging changes were a game-changer yet, but they’re also not a nothingburger.
UCLA was bound to have an imperfect start and was also bound to be the most scrutinized for it. That meet definitely had problems, but it’s not an existential disaster. UCLA will probably be fine but probably not great.
It’s still terrible that we have big neutral site meets without video and sometimes without scores, especially with top teams and high-profile athletes who could be driving major engagement. What are we even doing here, and how has nobody managed to make it stop? I’d say WCGA needs to step in and make some requirements for meet hosts, but I suspect that the incestuousness of this sport makes that a non-starter, and that’s also fundamentally why it’s still happening. One wonders whether these meet organizers have any self-awareness that they’re actively making the sport worse.
Yes, it’s fine to criticize form and technique online. Yes, gymnasts have free speech and are allowed to chime in. No, a gymnast participating in the conversation doesn’t invalidate it, doesn’t make people making the critiques bad or mean people, and doesn’t mean that the conversation needs to end.
Bonus Comments:
Level 10 matters!! Gone are the days of people annoyingly declaring any good freshman a “level 10 ninja” and pretending she was under the radar because they didn’t personally know her even though she was a five-time national champion, and I’ll never be ungrateful for that. But it’s just very satisfying to see the best level 10 gymnasts transitioning so cleanly to college success exactly the way we figured they would. I mean, look at this.
Very nice start by Michigan State. There’s always a random team that gets a hilariously high ranking in the first week, but those seasons do tend to work out relatively well. The Spartans accomplished this without Skyla Schulte (hopefully temporarily). This could be the beginning of a great journey.
Concern: Michigan at Denver was a huge bummer.
This meet was bad but also sad. I don’t like to be melodramatic about scores from early January—neither of these teams is going to count falls or score under 196.000 every week. But this level of discomfiture from two teams that have abundant depth and also presumably knew the date of this meet months in advance wasn’t enjoyable.
A lot of the gymnasts who had mishaps at this meet, especially on Denver’s end, were grizzled veterans. I don’t really care that Jahzara Ranger came off bars. They made a freshman do the first routine of their season, she showed she’s serious in the rest of the meet (as we all knew she would be), and it’s going to be fine. The rest… Even for the beginning of the season, it was a lot for a single meet, and the energy in the arena was not the loveliest.
Michigan will get more freshmen into lineups, get them some experience, and chalk this one up to growing pains. Denver, with zero freshman routines and likely to stay that way, will just try to forget. Everything will probably be fine. It just really wasn’t fun.
Bonus Concerns:
There are some really gnarly looking ring leaps in this sport right now. What compels a floor coach to approve these things? Last year when the horror was twisting wolf jumps on floor, I could understand that gymnasts chucking those things were often not the most naturally talented leapers and didn’t have a thousand other options. Surely everyone who even trains rings has something else they could be doing instead?
Why are all the inevitably missing people missing? I kind of hoped Skyla Schulte would be doing gymnastics! Bella Salcedo, Elise Tisler, Kayla Pardue, Emily Leese, the Stallings twins? Every year brings a cluster of important gymnasts who just don’t show up for undisclosed reasons, and every year it’s ridiculous to me that we have so little transparency on it. Someday, when we’re a real sport, we’ll have mandated injury reports released by teams.
READ THIS NEXT: Questions, Comments, Concerns: Preseason
Article by Rebecca Scally
