We’re down to eight teams, and numerous narratives we watched all season have drawn to a close. It’s fun now to revisit what I wrote about in the early weeks of this season. “How will the new Michigan routines stack up against last year’s standards?” Not too well, as it turns out. “How badly will losing Jordan Chiles and Ana Padurariu hurt UCLA?” Not insurmountably, but it definitely didn’t help. It’s a good time of year for analysis, as we shift into postmortem mode for teams that disappointed at regionals and get really granular about the dynamics of the two remaining championships. Here’s what I’m wondering, pondering, and worrying about regarding the last women standing in the 2024 NCAA gymnastics season.
Question: How long does it take to understand a coaching era?
The successes of Arkansas and Stanford this week, in their head coaches’ fifth and seventh years, respectively, while UCLA struggled in its coach’s second, prompted some to conclude that we just need to be way more patient before assessing how good a coach really is.
When it comes down to it, I think that gymnastics coaches tend to stay in one place for too long to make classifying a coaching era as successful or unsuccessful make sense based on a peak result. There…
