NCAA Gymnastics

NCAA women's gymnastics (the men's is still, shall we say, a work in progress) is becoming a really big deal, with floor routines going viral online, college gymnasts becoming more prominent thanks to NIL marketing, and a general atmosphere of fun that's often missing in the gymnastics people see during the Olympics.

Sunisa Lee. Lee was the women's all-around gold medalist at the Tokyo Olympics, then headed straight to Auburn University with a casual pitstop at Dancing With the Stars, where she made it to the semifinals. Beginning in January, Auburn's gymnastics team kicked off a fever dream of a season, starring Lee. The team made it to the national championships in Fort Worth for the first time ever, and Lee became the national balance beam champion. Lee is the first American Olympic all-around gold medalist to do NCAA gymnastics. That's probably thanks to the change in the NCAA's name, image, and likeness rule; now, a gymnast with the name recognition and marketing power of Lee can cash in while training about half as many hours and working easier skills (despite needing to compete them with flawless form weekly for four months). Lee has made no bones in interviews about the difficulty of being so recognizable on campus, and the gymnastics team had to hire security. But her familiar face brought tons of new fans to Auburn and to the sport, and we'll be glad to see her back in action this season (even if we know her time in NCAA may be precious because, you know, she's got an Olympics to train for).

If you haven't watched a college gymnastics meet before, you should probably know about the face tattoos first. There are a lot of them. College gymnastics is the perfect blend of sports and entertainment – a ratio that most other sports would kill for. It is fast-paced (a college dual meet takes an hour and a half, max). You will see every routine on all four apparatuses, six gymnasts from each team alternating through two at a time – unlike during, say, the Olympics, when you are lucky to see two routines before a commercial and a shot of someone getting her ankle taped. The block of three or four SEC meets on any given Friday in winter is called Friday Night Heights. The graphics department rivals any that you'll see during an NFL or MLB game. You can see who hits a handstand on uneven bars at a perfect vertical. NCAA scoring for women's gymnastics remains under the perfect 10 system, aso it's easy to tell a great routine by how close to 10 a gymnast can get. And then there's the intricately choreographed floor routines. Every year, someone's NCAA floor goes viral, and there's a reason for that – these routines are often set to pop music and meant to get crowds on their feet. Balance beam routines have music in NCAA, too (lots of Swifties in the NCAA, just saying). The energy of a meet can be seen in how enthusiastically gymnasts cheer each other on, and in their gravity-defying post-routine salutes to the judges.