Data Deep Dive: Leotard Trends

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Here at College Gym News, we love leotards! So much so that we started building out our leotard database in 2020 and spent last offseason adding as full of a history to the database as we could find. Now that we’ve collected all this data on leotards, we decided to dive in to see what kinds of trends emerged about when leotards are debuted, how often they’re worn, and more. Read on to find out what we learned!

Leotard Stats

To begin our analysis, we looked at some general stats about the leotards we have available in the database. Across all currently active teams, we have 2237 leotards dating back to 2006! However, these aren’t evenly distributed across teams. In the chart below you can see how many leotards we have in our database for each team. At the high end, we have Florida with 110 leotards in the database, followed by Georgia with 83, while at the low end, Ithaca has just two leotards in the database that they’ve been wearing at all their meets for the past four years.

Of the over 2000 leotards in the database, the average number of times a leotard is worn is 4.3, but there is a wide range of repeated wears. Nine leotards have been worn by their teams over 20 times, while 380 leotards (almost 17%) have only been worn once. 784 (35%) of the leotards have been worn only two times or less by their respective teams. See the chart below for the full distribution.

Leotard Debut Dates

One of the trends we were most interested in exploring was when leotards are most likely to be debuted. To do this, we classified each leotard’s debut date based on the week of the season or postseason meet they were debuted at. The most common week to debut leotards is by far conference championships week, with 262 leotards debuted there. This makes sense as (almost) every team gets to compete at conference championships and as an important meet for all involved, it is an exciting time to debut a new leotard. Excluding week 1, when fewer teams compete in general, early in the season is the next most common time to debut leotards, with weeks two and three having the next most leotards at 199 and 197, respectively. Regionals and nationals are also very common, and given the smaller number of teams competing at those meets, likely have an outsized percentage of teams debuting leotards, although we did not calculate that stat.

The single week across all the years with the most leotards debuted was the 2025 conference championship weekend with 39 different teams debuting leotards. That same weekend over the three years prior also reached the top of the record list, with 31, 27, and 28 leotards debuting at the 2024, 2023, and 2022 conference championships, respectively.

The postseason is clearly a very common time to debut new leotards, especially for the top teams who expect to make it there each year. LSU, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Michigan all have over half of their leotards being debuted in the postseason rather than in the regular season.

We also see different numbers of leotards debuted per year across the teams. Some teams have much bigger budgets than others, and therefore can debut more leotards per year. Clemson, despite being one of the newest programs in the NCAA, tops the list and has debuted 12 new leotards over just two years competing for an average of six leotards per year. Looking just at the post-COVID era for consistency and completeness, Florida, UCLA, Oklahoma, and Auburn all have debuted five or more leotards per year on average. Wilberforce also debuted five leotards in its one year as a program so far. We will see if that trend continues going forward.

Leotard Brand

Finally, we decided to look at brand trends for the leotards in our database. It’s worth noting that not all leotards in the database have a brand listed, however, we do have brand info for 72% of the leotards, and we will focus on that subset for the remainder of the analysis.

GK is the most common brand by far, with 42% of the leotards being produced by them. Alpha Factor, Sylvia P, Dreamlight, and Ozone are the other popular leotard brands in our database, each representing 8% or more of the leotards. There is then a long tail of 22 other brands in the database, however, none have a large volume of leotards.

We see a shift over time with which brands are most common. Dreamlight and Alpha Factor were common brands in the early years of our database, before GK really took over and created as many as 72% of the leotards in 2019. Ozone became more common in the late 2010s/early 2020s followed by Sylvia P in recent years, with Sylvia P creating 30% of the 2024 new leotards.