This article has been edited for length and clarity and reflects the author’s perspective.
Ornate leotards, high-flying skills, stands full of fans. College gymnastics can project an image of perfection–skills look effortless, and the athletes finish successful routines with glowing smiles. Teams broadcast the wins, celebrations, recruits, and rankings on social media. Less often discussed is what goes into making a team successful and what happens behind the scenes to make those exciting competitions happen.
Jason Vonk, a former assistant coach at George Washington, Yale, and Georgia, had 12 years of experience across the three universities when he moved on from college coaching. According to Vonk, a lot of what defined his time in college gymnastics wasn’t reflected in the polished version of the sport that fans and recruits see. For him, it was a system marked by fear, silence, and a culture where, as he puts it, “head coaches get complete leeway, and the assistants can’t report them, or they will lose their job.”
Vonk described his experiences at all three schools as having similar negative traits, though Georgia, where he coached from June 2018 to 2022, stood out in particular. In reflecting on his time in Athens, he said, “I should have reported some of the things that were going on” at the time. Though he didn’t make complaints while he was on the coaching roster, his experiences felt impactful enough that a year after he left the team, he sent a letter reporting the things he witnessed.
One of the things he noted was the discord between what happened in public and what happened in private. “College athletics take a team value and uses it for manipulation and control,” said Vonk. “It’s just a tool for the leaders.”
Former Georgia gymnast Naya Howard, who is spending her senior year on the Michigan State gymnastics team, reported a similar experience. She recalled the team motto, “Together we are…,” being twisted into something punitive. According to Howard, “They would use it against us and say, ‘You are this,’ or ‘You are that.’”
These mottos or values are words or phrases teams use as a point of focus throughout the season to organize around a shared goal. Teams across the NCAA come up with certain words that represent shared values. These can be words like leadership, discipline, passion, dedication, sacrifice, etc. In Vonk’s experience, these words became tools that the coaching staff used to manipulate the team.
Vonk was told numerous times, “We are a family.” His response to this was blunt: “you don’t fire family members.” It was this difference between what was said and what was done that caused some of the issues he witnessed. To illustrate his point, Vonk told a story about a meet Georgia won while he was on staff. “Everyone was on a high because we had just won the meet; and the coaches pulled one of the athletes aside and laid into her about something I can’t recall, said Vonk. ”That athlete walked away from having a great meet wanting to leave the team.”
This difference between stated expectations and action also extended to time management. Vonk observed that coaches did not always value an athlete’s time, but athletes were expected to respect the coach’s. During the season, the NCAA limits countable athletically related activities (CARA) to 20 hours per week, but in Vonk’s experience, colleges often abuse this rule. This rule exists because student-athletes have to balance classes, homework, community service, tutoring, study hours, physical therapy, and additional obligations on top of a full practice schedule.
While the NCAA also requires one full day off per week during the season, even if an athlete’s calendar marks a day as off, Vonk found there are still expectations on their time. In Vonk’s opinion, this lack of respect for athletes’ time has “gone overboard.” He gave an example of leaving practice an hour late because the athletes still had work to finish. The gymnasts were required to make up that time, even though they should have wrapped up practice an hour prior, adding additional obligations to already packed schedules.
This coach-athlete double standard extended to respect. Vonk described a situation in which three athletes were working on bars toward the end of practice, and the rest of the team was yelled at and told to cheer for them. Yet the very next day, when two girls were still finishing vault, the coach decided to leave practice entirely. This inconsistency, he said, was common. It left the athletes feeling they would be punished for the same actions that coaches routinely committed.
Several athletes interviewed also brought up a lack of transparency within the sport. Howard argued that oversight should go both ways, suggesting “a random pop-in from administration to make sure NCAA rules are being regulated within the gym.” And in her view, if athletes can be randomly drug-tested, “coaches should be tested for rule-following as well.”
The lack of transparency between coaches and gymnasts was especially evident when injuries were involved, according to several gymnasts interviewed. One former collegiate gymnast, who spoke anonymously, said coaches often controlled decisions about her health and career. “They have the ability to take your career out from under your feet, ” she said.
During her sophomore year, she struggled with injuries and illnesses. She felt the team needed her to compete, however, because they had several girls out with injuries. She competed consistently each weekend despite battling her health. Even though she put the team first, she often felt overlooked.
“I was told I was on the list to be medically retired that year, because they were planning to have a few of the seniors return for fifth years,” she said. When those seniors chose not to take their fifth year, the conversation was completely dropped because, she explained, now the coaches needed her back on the team for the following year.
She expressed, “If it weren’t for those girls choosing not to take their fifth year, my career would have been over.” Putting your fate in someone else’s hands for the sake of your own career was a common trait across the interviews.
Former Auburn gymnast Madelynn Crow also shared her story of how her career ended abruptly due to what she felt was a lack of trust and transparency in the gym and training room.
Crow said this lack of transparency “ruined” her college gymnastics experience. In her end-of-year meeting, she told coaches that “none of this would have happened if you had listened to me,” adding that if you’re not a top athlete on their radar, “they don’t bother with you.”
According to Crow, after severely rolling her ankle on a wonky turn on floor, she was told to go to the hospital on her own for X-rays. When the X-ray showed that nothing was broken, her trainer believed she would be safe to continue training.
“I knew something else was wrong,” Crow said. Her trainer didn’t order an MRI because nothing was shown on the X-ray, and the team needed her to compete on beam, recalled Crow. “During Thanksgiving break, when I went home, I got an MRI from my home doctor, and he told me I would need surgery because multiple ligaments in my ankle were torn.”
Upon her return after the holiday break, Crow had a meeting with her coaches and trainer to explain what her doctor had told her and to show them the MRI results. Her trainer said she would send them over to their doctors at Auburn.
“The following practice day, my trainer starts taping my ankle because she claimed the doctor said my ankle was completely fine and I can continue to train,” said Crow. Some time later, Crow expressed that she would like to talk to the ankle specialist herself and would like to hear him say that she was okay to train. If he said she was, she would deal with the pain and continue.
She met with the specialist, and he said he never received her original imaging; her new MRI results were much worse than before, and she would need full ankle reconstruction. The doctor added, “You’ll be lucky to walk and run again.”
In her opinion, had her coaches and trainer listened to her, she would be prepping to compete in her senior season at Auburn right now.
Howard also observed situations where athletes felt pressured to continue practicing despite being injured. She described what she felt was a manipulative injury culture where coaches pushed athletes to keep taking turns and to continue to practice even while hurt, all while threatening scholarships or lineup spots.
Howard spoke about how she feels the NCAA environment fails to separate the athlete from the person. She explained that some programs emphasize winning above all else. “They cared about winning; not about knowing we’re people and not robots.” She said, “Athletes need personal days, room to handle off days without punishment, and coaches willing to adapt their communication styles in practice.”
Howard believes the coach-athlete relationship is supposed to function on trust and communication, even with gymnasts who are harder to coach, and she stressed that “you can’t just play favorites all the time.”
She said when athletes are having recruiting conversations, they should be honest about the realities of college gymnastics rather than “feeding people what they want to hear.”
Howard praised her new school, Michigan State, for understanding that “everyone responds differently to certain types of coaching” and for adapting their approach to each athlete’s learning style.
The public sees packed arenas, perfect tens, glitter-covered leotards, and teams chanting unity slogans, but some athletes and former coaches tell a different story. For them, it’s a story of people being celebrated publicly while feeling silenced privately. These stories reveal the painful truth behind college athletics; because in the NCAA, it’s not all glory.
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Article by Heather Parker
Parker is entering her second season as a gymnast at Central Michigan after transferring from Georgia. She is majoring in photojournalism.
Sorry, but I can’t muster much respect for someone who speaks out about perceived injustices years after they happened, and not when he was in a position to do something about it.
I worked at a D1 top 15 school in youth gymnastics. We shared the college teams’ gym. I witnessed 4 years of athlete treatment Monday-Friday, 1-5. I worked gymnastics camps alongside many of the young ladies during camps and after hours. All I can say is the coach controls every aspect of their lives, and she didn’t want walk-ons. They were too hard to control. They couldn’t really major in what they wanted and forget dating or socializing with girls outside the gym. The tone from the coach was very intense and the stress she put on them, palpable.