The thrilling national championships was far from the only jaw-dropping moment of 2024, as this gymnastics season provided endless highlights and lowlights. Let’s reminisce on a handful of the best moments and a few we hope to forget once the chalk has finally settled.
Highs
New National Champions
Three years after getting just the seventh national champion in the 40-plus year history of NCAA women’s gymnastics, we now have our eighth, as LSU took home the title to conclude its historic season. The Tigers were once known as “the best program to have never won a championship,” having finished as runner-up in 2016, 2017, and 2019, and are now free of that moniker as their title followed a 2024 campaign that included an SEC title and new program high score of 198.475. NCAA all-around champion Haleigh Bryant, who recently announced she’ll return for a fifth season, was the leader of the team that propelled Jay Clark to his first title as head coach after winning five in a row (plus two others) as an assistant at Georgia.
Record-Breaking Regular Season
The biggest story coming out of the NCAA semifinals was Oklahoma taking itself out of contention in the opening rotation, as it followed a regular season for the history books. The Sooners’ resume was unblemished heading into nationals, coming off a dominant regionals and a Big 12 title-winning performance that saw them post a 198.950—good for the highest score ever in NCAA history. With four of the nation’s best all-arounders—Jordan Bowers, Faith Torrez, Katherine LeVassuer, and Audrey Davis—leading the charge, Oklahoma’s 2024 season average and NQS are the sport’s best-ever. The Sooners also posted an incredible streak of 11-straight scores of 198 or higher. This team was an NCAA championship away from being crowned the best women’s collegiate gymnastics team ever, and there’s a compelling argument that it’s still in the conversation after all it accomplished prior to the national championships.
The “10-est” Tens
Our Twitter feeds are already full of the season’s scores that didn’t pass the eye test. Now, let’s focus on the truly perfect routines that reminded us that, as Bart Conner astutely noted, “not all 10s are created equal.”
Vault
Sage Kellerman (and again)
Bars
Beam
Floor
Aleah Finnegan (and again)
Changing of the Guard
Scores aside, the parity of talent among teams, conferences, and divisions is at an all-time high.
We saw the gap between the presumptive top teams and “everybody else” shrink in real time, especially come the postseason when chaos reigned supreme. Oklahoma stalling out in the semifinals was the biggest headline, but perennial championship qualifiers, including Michigan, UCLA, and Denver, didn’t make it past regionals.
Cinderella stories are nothing new in gymnastics—it doesn’t matter how talented a team is or what it’s achieved in the past; it still has to hit on the day. The difference in 2024 is that there’s far less margin for error now if a higher-ranked team falters, and literally dozens of teams just waiting to capitalize on the mistakes (just ask LSU, California, Arkansas, Stanford, Penn State, or any number of programs that disrupted the status quo this year).
Team Debuts
For the second year in a row, we saw multiple new programs make their collegiate debuts—Clemson, Talladega, and Utica. All three teams enjoyed regular and postseason success. Clemson shattered score expectations, sold out Littlejohn Coliseum, and qualified to regionals. Multiple individual gymnasts from Utica and Talladega competed at the NCGA and USAG national championships, respectively. The Tornados’ star freshman Krystin Johnson even won a national title for her booming Yurchenko one and a half on vault to cap off a phenomenal inaugural season for the second-ever HBCU program (not to mention Fisk’s Morgan Price winning the all-around at the same meet).
Lows
The Overscoring Situation
Overscoring has been a recurring theme in recent years, but January’s now-notorious Tennessee Collegiate Classic kicked the conversation into overdrive. It was the culmination of the high-scoring epidemic, as a meet with no video or live scores provided judges the perfect opportunity to shine, giving seven teams new program records by nearly three-quarters of a point and dishing out five perfect scores for routines with clear deductions. The criticism isn’t a knock on the gymnasts or teams, solely a judging situation that was out of control.
It wasn’t just fans crying foul, either. With commentators, coaches, and even active judges all voicing concerns this season, a 2004-style judges’ reckoning seems plausible, if not inevitable. It’s a bad look for the sport when the analysts break down deductions for a routine while the judges award it a perfect score, which happened more than once in 2024.
KJC’s Retirement
Some goodbyes are harder than others, and losing beloved longtime commentator Kathy Johnson Clarke to retirement falls into that category. The sport has been privileged to have an analyst with such knowledge, passion, and virtuosity calling the sport. Johnson Clarke has an unmatched ability to describe gymnastics in ways that enhance the experience for new and knowledgeable fans alike, and her impact will be felt for years to come.
Lack of Access
It’s 2024. We can live stream middle school soccer games, so why can’t we have live video and working scores for meets featuring some of the sport’s best gymnasts? The season-opening Super 16 quads had a wonky, slapdash stream posted at the eleventh hour, the infamous Tennessee Collegiate Classic had neither videos nor scores (which only fueled claims that the judging was rigged), and Metroplex continues to live in the Dark Ages despite facing this exact criticism every single year. If meet organizers, coaches, gymnasts, and fans want women’s collegiate gymnastics to be treated like mainstream sports, they need to demand the basic access it deserves or continue to face the general public’s concerns over legitimacy.
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Article by Claire Billman and Brandis Heffner
