After a dramatic offseason that saw coaching and conference changes, transfers and several college gymnasts dominating at the Paris Olympics, NCAA gymnastics officially returns on Friday. And, just like every season before, 2025 brings countless storylines to watch and more than a few questions.
How will Olympians Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles fare? Will Cecile Canqueteau-Landi — known best as Simone Biles’ longtime coach — be able to turn things around at Georgia? Can LSU repeat? Will Oklahoma find redemption? And what about all of these conference changes?
The season opens on Friday night with intriguing meets including Iowa State at No. 2 LSU (7:30 p.m. ET on SEC Network) and Utah State at No. 5 Utah (9 p.m. ET on ESPN+). Several other top-ranked teams compete over the weekend at various invitational meets: No. 4 California, No. 10 UCLA and No. 19 Oregon State headline a competition in Oceanside, California, on Saturday, and No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 17 Auburn are part of an invitational in Nashville, Tennessee, on the same day. No. 12 Denver and No. 13 Michigan conclude the weekend with a must-see dual meet (5 p.m. on ESPN2) on Sunday.
But of course, that’s just the first weekend. The season will only get more interesting — and the stakes even higher — as it continues, culminating with the crowning of a new champion on April 19 in Fort Worth, Texas. Here’s the gymnasts, teams and everything you need to know entering the new year.
Golden Girls
After helping the American squad win Olympic team gold in Paris over the summer, Carey (Oregon State) and Chiles (UCLA) are back for their respective teams and looking to collect even more team and individual hardware.
Carey, who also earned the Olympic bronze medal on vault, remained with the Beavers during the lead-up to Paris and is now back in Corvallis for her senior year. She performed with the “Gold Over America” tour during the fall, so the 24-year-old had minimal downtime after the Olympics. But she was the NCAA all-around and floor runner-up last season, even while juggling elite and college, and will be a threat all this season.
Chiles, who was controversially stripped of her bronze medal on floor in Paris and remains embroiled in a legal battle to get it back, focused solely on elite last year. But she has returned to Westwood for her junior season following her stint on the GOAT tour as well. The 23-year-old is a two-time NCAA champion after winning the 2023 titles on floor and bars, and will look to bring the Bruins back to their former glory as seven-time national champions, after a few sub-par years by UCLA standards.
Leanne Wong, a four-time medalist at the world championships and alternate for the U.S. team in Paris, is also back at Florida for her senior season. She was co-champion on the uneven bars at the 2024 NCAA championships and helped lead the Gators, ranked No. 3 in the preseason poll, to a runner-up finish in 2022 and 2023.
Joscelyn Roberson, Team USA’s other alternate and member of the 2023 world championship team, will be making her debut at Arkansas this season. She will become the first national team member to compete for the eighth-ranked Razorbacks.
Other Olympians competing this season include Aleah Finnegan (LSU), Emma Malabuyo (UCLA) and Levi Jung-Ruivivar (Stanford), who all represented the Philippines, as well as Canada’s Cassie Lee (Iowa), Ava Stewart (Minnesota) and Aurelie Tran (Iowa) and Hungary’s Csenge Bacskay (Georgia).
Return to glory in Athens?
It’s been a challenging stretch for Georgia gymnastics. The school’s 10 national championships are the most in NCAA gymnastics history, but the team hasn’t won the title since 2009 and finished in last place at the SEC Championships for the third year in a row in March.
After the 2024 NCAA championships, Georgia dismissed head coach Courtney Kupets Carter — who had led the team to four straight national championships during her time as a student-athlete at the school — after seven seasons in the role. Less than a week later, the school hired Canqueteau-Landi and Ryan Roberts as co-head coaches.
Canqueteau-Landi had been Biles’ personal coach since 2017 at the World Champions Centre alongside her husband Laurent Landi, and the news — just months before the Paris Olympics in which Biles was slated to compete — sent shockwaves through the gymnastics world. Canqueteau-Landi remained at World Champions Centre through the Olympics and then arrived in Athens in August.
Working with Roberts, who had been an assistant at Georgia for the past two seasons, the pair brought in big-name transfers like Bacskay and former national team member Kara Eaker, and will have stars like 2024 SEC Freshman of the Year Lily Smith, Ady Wahl and Naya Howard still on the roster. Roberts was excited about the team’s future when speaking to ESPN in November.
“One of our big goals is to hit 24-for-24 every meet,” Roberts said. “If we do that, we’re probably going to do pretty well and the results will come. During the last few years we’ve been good in practice but we just haven’t been able to execute exactly how we need to in the meets, so that execution is something we’re focused on. We’re just keeping it simple, we can’t control the scores, so all we can do is control our execution and just trying to get better every single day.”
Georgia is ranked No. 14 in the preseason coaches poll and begins competition on Jan. 12 in a quad meet against Denver, Missouri and Long Island.
LSU looks to run it back
Entering last season, LSU had been the NCAA title runner-up on four occasions but had never been able to claim the top spot on the podium.
But 2024 changed everything.
Led throughout the season by eventual NCAA all-around champion Haleigh Bryant, the Tigers rallied back during their final rotation in the team championship on beam with the highest collective score (49.7625) in the history of the event to win the title. Bryant later told reporters it was something she had wanted since she had committed to the school — and the chance to repeat was so enticing she announced she would be coming back for a fifth year.
And this season, which kicks off with a banner ceremony ahead of the meet on Friday, looks like it could be more of the same. In addition to Bryant, the Tigers’ roster is absolutely stacked with talent. Finnegan, who clinched the NCAA victory on beam in April and won the individual floor title, returns following her Olympic debut for her senior season.
There’s also sophomore Konnor McClain, who won the SEC beam title in her freshman season and is now coming off an Achilles’ tear which derailed her Olympic dreams. Fellow reigning SEC champions KJ Johnson (floor) and Ashley Cowan (bars) also return, as do high-scoring contributors Sierra Ballard, Amari Drayton and Olivia Dunne.
Not to mention, national team members Kaliya Lincoln, Zoe Miller and Lexi Zeiss are all freshmen on the squad, and should make an immediate impact.
The school announced it had broken its previous record with 8,680 season tickets sold ahead of this season. With that raucous home crowd and a roster depth most coaches and teams could only dream about, LSU certainly has everything it needs to repeat this season.
Oklahoma’s redemption year
Of course, no team might want it more — and be more poised to do so — than the top-ranked Oklahoma Sooners.
The two-time defending national champions were the heavy favorites to win the 2024 national title after spending the entirety of the 2024 season ranked No. 1. But the team had a disastrously uncharacteristic start in its first rotation on vault in the semifinal, when three gymnasts had major landing errors. They were in last place entering their second event and were never able to fully close the deficit, missing out in competing in the national championship meet for the first time since 2012.
The Sooners have a lot to prove this year and will likely be using last year’s heartache as motivation all season long. Led by reigning individual NCAA champions Audrey Davis (bars and beam) and Faith Torrez (beam), and 2024 Big 12 all-around champion Jordan Bowers, Oklahoma will be an immediate force in its first year in the SEC and among the favorites — if not the favorite — for the NCAA title come April.
Even vault, the apparatus which caused the team’s early exit in Texas, should be a highly valuable weapon for the Sooners — there are nine gymnasts on the roster who can compete a vault with a 10.0 start value. With this much talent and a sizable chip on their shoulders, the Oklahoma team will be fun to watch this year as they look for a seventh national title.
Old faces, new places
In addition to Oklahoma making its SEC debut, and subsequently changing the conference’s championship format from a one-day event to a two-day event, several teams will be in new conferences this year. Because the Pac-12 largely disbanded following the 2023-2024 academic year, it marked the end of regular meetings between storied rivals, and now some of the consistently top-ranked teams in the country are starting new chapters.
While Oregon State and Washington State remain in the two-school conference, UCLA and Washington are now in the Big Ten, California and Stanford are in the ACC (yes, the two west coast schools are officially in the Atlantic Coast Conference) and Arizona, Arizona State and Utah have joined the Big 12. It is equal parts confusing, geographically maddening and disappointing for fans of the previous rivalries, and will undoubtedly be interesting to see how each team fares in its new conference.
If it’s not weird enough that reigning Pac-12 champion Utah will now be in the Big 12 and reigning Big 12 champion Oklahoma will now be in the SEC, add this one to the list: The current Pac-12 all-around champion and Gymnast of the Year is now in the SEC. Selena Harris, who also won the conference title on vault and tied for first on bars, was dismissed from UCLA following the season for unspecified reasons and is now at Florida.
The junior should be a key member of the star-studded — if not injury-plagued — Gators in 2025, alongside Wong, Anya Pilgrim, Kayla DiCello, Riley McCusker and sisters Skye and Sloane Blakely. McCusker missed the 2024 season following an ankle surgery and DiCello and Skye Blakeley both ruptured their Achilles’ tendons in June while trying to make the U.S. Olympic team. DiCello had another surgery on her other foot in December, and it’s unclear how much either gymnast will be able to contribute this season.
