Paris Olympic success has men’s college gymnastics coaches ‘optimistic’ for the sport’s future

Men’s gymnastics in the US have been on an overall downward trajectory for decades, but the success of the Paris Olympics have college coaches excited for the future.

Men’s gymnastics in the US have been on an overall downward trajectory for decades. High school and college programs have been discontinued in large numbers, including storied Big Ten programs at the University of Minnesota and University of Iowa being cut as recently as 2021. But the United States’ performance at the Paris Olympics – with a team entirely composed of NCAA products – has college coaches feeling hopeful; team members and alternates represented Stanford, University of Michigan, Penn State and University of Minnesota’s defunct program. The Olympians represented a fifth of all current programs, but that’s because there are only 15 active programs, 12 Division I and three Division III. Those numbers were nearly even lower – William & Mary planned to discontinue its team after the 2020-21 season but reinstated the team just a few months later. Another ray of hope for the sport came in the fall of 2021. Simpson College and then Greenville University announced they would be launching men’s gymnastics programs. “That was unprecedented, we hadn’t added teams for 60 years, and so to see that momentum come in terms of addition of teams was really exciting,” Penn State Head Coach Randy Jepson told CNN Sport. Both schools are Division III with around 1,000 students each, paling in comparison to Division I gymnastics schools like University of Michigan with 50,000 students. But Colin Payne, the head coach at Simpson, isn’t concerned by that.