If you ask a group of longtime college gymnastics fans for their lists of the greatest coaches and teams, they’ll probably have roughly the same list (and it’s likely to be a pretty short one at that). Since women’s gymnastics was added to the NCAA championships program for the 1981 to 1982 school year, relatively few coaches or programs have ever qualified to a national championship—let alone won a title. However, within the last decade we’ve seen an influx of big-name former gymnasts hired as head coaches as more programs try to make it onto that exclusive list. We wanted to know, is that all it takes? Is an all-time great gymnast guaranteed to find coaching success? To find answers, we took a look at what the data had to say.
Admittedly, scores and rankings are a crude means of determining a coach’s level of success. Factors like injury rate, recruiting, or athlete and staff turnover are all just as significant—arguably moreso as they reflect the underlying culture and health of the program—so take this analysis for what it is: A comparison of current NCAA gymnastics head coaches by the numbers, without considering more intangible variables.
Note: NCAA gym records and documentation prior to the mid-2000s are frequently incomplete and/or…
