After the announcement that the Olympics in LA in 2028 will feature mixed-gender team events, including gymnastics, current and former gymnasts took to the internet to post about how excited they were—either to watch or to participate. IOC and FIG officials cited potential audience growth and gender parity among their reasons for supporting the new addition. Excited by the prospect of more gymnastics, fans immediately started wondering what the format would look like, sparking debates on Reddit about what would be best.
Given the excitement around mixed team events and the general desire to push both women’s and men’s collegiate gymnastics into mainstream sports conversations, I wanted to imagine what it would be like to add a mixed team event to the NCAA gymnastics season.
In my imagination, an NCAA WAG and MAG Mixed Pairs event would look a lot like the Swiss Cup. The format has changed since its founding in 1982, but in 2024 it worked like this: ten teams compete in a preliminary round. One man and one woman from the same country combine their scores from their choice of events. The bottom two teams are eliminated after that first round. Scores carry over and teams compete on a second, different event; the bottom four are out after this semi-final. The remaining four pairs have their scores reset and compete for medals.
Addison Fatta (Oklahoma) won the Swiss Cup with Yul Moldaur in 2022. When I talked to Fatta, she said that the Swiss Cup was her “favorite international assignment” that she ever attended, for two reasons. First, the strategy. “I started on vault to make sure we got through to the next round. And then I did bars and we made it through again. Then I did floor, and then I actually ended again on bars. You could repeat one event…so I actually never did beam,” said Fatta. She told me that was a conscious choice: the arena was “absolutely packed” and she didn’t want beam nerves to get in the team’s way. This strategy, combined with Moldauer’s efforts on parallel bars, pommel horse, floor, and a return to p-bars was a winner.
Fatta also loved the camaraderie of the mixed pairs format. “It was so fun being able to compete alongside Yul, not only because we were competing to represent our country, but it built such a special bond between us,” said Fatta (And, hey, since Yul is an OU alum, could we technically call the American team at the 2022 Swiss Cup the first college mixed pair…even if their collegiate careers didn’t overlap??) Fatta told me that the current WAG and MAG teams at OU are already super chummy and primed for events like mixed pairs teams. They work out together, and they go to one another’s meets. “It would be more like competing with a friend rather than competing with somebody you’re now meeting and then becoming friends,” said Fatta. They know each other’s strengths, which is good for strategizing on the spot.
As for whether audiences are into this kind of competition, Fatta agrees with me (and FIG and the IOC and Moldauer, who tweeted, “This is awesome!” after the LA28 announcement). “Everybody loves mixed pairs and loves how it’s run and loves the community part of it…So I do think it would bring a lot of attention, and I think viewers would really enjoy watching,” said Fatta.
Now. Die-hard gym fans already know: NCAA gymnastics mixed pairs are probably never going to happen. It’s so fun to dream, but everyone I talked to for this story, from current college gymnasts to coaches to armchair fans agreed: the logistics of putting together a mixed team event at NCAA championships would prove way too difficult. I even reached out to the NCAA Playing Rules Administrator for women’s gymnastics, just to give her a chance to laugh and tell me, “cute, but no way!” (unfortunately, I never heard back from her).
The first questions that arise are: when would you hold something like this? If it was part of NCAA Championships, WAG and MAG would have to hold their meets on the same weekend — and this would be another event tacked onto the climax of an already grueling marathon of a season. It’s worth noting that this is a concern for the LA 2028 Olympics as well — how can gymnasts be expected to do more when they’re already exhausted by the sport’s “regular” demands?
Next: what arenas in the US could even accommodate an NCAA mixed team event? WAG and MAG events often share podium space, which means they couldn’t compete at the same time without having to completely overhaul the equipment after every routine. And then there’s the issue of timing. Video from the 2022 Swiss Cup is two and a half hours long on YouTube — with no commercials. Gymnastics Now predicted that the brand new 2025 European Championships Mixed Team event would clock in at just under two hours. But if you include the team introductions and medal ceremony, the actual run time was closer to 2 hours and 45 minutes. It seems wildly unlikely that ESPN or NBC would go for something like this.
Maybe most importantly: there simply aren’t enough Division I men’s collegiate gymnastics teams for this to be a viable event right now. As of this writing, there are only 12. Out of those 12, only one school (Oklahoma) is part of the SEC. Can we imagine this kind of thing being popular if fan favorites like LSU, Alabama, Georgia, or Florida are missing? Even if a mixed team event could theoretically provide some gender equity in the moment, it wouldn’t actually be possible to pull the event off until parity between college WAG and MAG exists in the first place.
And yet, it’s still so fun to dream. If you ever want to brainstorm changes to the format of NCAA gymnastics meets, you should call Justin Spring. Currently an associate head coach of the women’s team at Alabama, Spring won a bronze team medal at the 2008 Olympics and was the head coach for the University of Illinois men’s team for 12 seasons. The problem with my mixed team dream, he said, is that it’s making two already complex sports even more complicated to watch. Audience growth has to come from simplification instead.
For Spring, the die-hard college gym fan isn’t his target audience. Instead, speaking the language of defense and offense, of team v. team — the language of ball sports, frankly — is what Justin says will get both WAG and MAG NCAA gymnastics the new audience members they deserve. While he was at Illinois, Spring pioneered a dual meet, head-to-head competition format in order to make men’s gymnastics meets more exciting to watch. This new format was five-up-five-count. Gymnasts from both teams alternated routines on the same event before moving on to the next one. The goal was to make the competition faster-paced, to apply some consistency to the judging (since they were judging one event at a time), and to add some drama — back-to-back routines on a single event give the sense that teams are influencing one another. “It finally brings in an element of, ‘I am going against this other team,’” Spring said. “Whereas, like, let’s be honest, we could just run our events, have the next team come in after us two hours later. Like you literally don’t even have to be in the same arena.”
Spring would love to see his dual meet, head-to-head format adopted by the women’s side. “I think when you have a head to head battle going on,” he said, “that allows you another really easy moment for a new fan to go, ‘I don’t really know what happened, but I don’t think she should have won’.” He would also love to see a simpler scoring system on the broadcast — forget showing the individual score out of 10.0 and dropping the lowest score on an event. Did Alabama score higher than LSU on vault, say? Great. Alabama gets a point and the score is 1-0. Next rotation. You could even have a ‘halftime’.
Spring and I talked about a lot of really fantastical changes that would send the NCAA gym world into a tailspin (can you imagine the chaos of coaches being able to throw a flag on the field of play and inquire about an opposing team’s score?! Spring can and I love it). He also told me that if I absolutely had to imagine a mixed team event at the college level — why not an all-star meet a few weeks after everyone’s championships? Maybe NQSs are part of qualification to that, or maybe not, but it wouldn’t be dependent on a MAG and WAG gymnast from the same school’s programs.
Now if I could just figure out how to get the broadcast time for the mixed-pairs collegiate all-star meet to be two hours with commercial breaks…
READ THIS NEXT: CGN Roundtable: Dream Meet Locations
Article by Kelly Jones
