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, like every season before it, 2025 brings countless stories to watch and more than a few questions.
How will Olympians Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles fare? Can Cecile Canqueteau-Landi, best known as Simone Biles' longtime coach, turn things around in Georgia? Can LSU repeat? Will Oklahoma find redemption? And what's up with all these changes at the conference?
The season begins Friday night with intriguing matchups 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 in various invitational meets: No. 4 California, No. 10 UCLA and No. 19 Oregon State headline a contest in Oceanside, Calif., on Saturday, and No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 17. Auburn is part of an invitational tournament in Nashville, Tennessee, on the same day. No. 12 Denver and No. 13 Michigan conclude the weekend with a can't-miss doubleheader (5 p.m. on ESPN2) on Sunday.
But of course, that's just the first weekend. The season will get more interesting, and the stakes will get even higher, as it progresses, culminating in the crowning of a new champion on April 19 in Fort Worth, Texas. Here are the gymnasts, the teams and everything you need to know heading into the new year.
golden girls
After helping Team USA win Olympic team gold in Paris over the summer, Carey (Oregon State) and Chiles (UCLA) are back with their respective teams and looking to collect even more individual and team hardware.
Carey, who also won the Olympic bronze medal on vault, remained with the Beavers during the lead-up to Paris and is now back in Corvallis for his 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 floor bronze medal in Paris and remains embroiled in a legal battle to get it back, focused solely on the elite last year. But he also returned to Westwood for his junior season following his stint on the GOAT tour. The 23-year-old is a two-time NCAA champion after winning the 2023 titles on floor and bars, and will look to return the Bruins to their former glory as seven-time national champions, after a few poor years by UCLA standards . .
Leanne Wong, a four-time world championship medalist and alternate for the U.S. team in Paris, is also back in 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 second-place finish in 2022 and 2023.
Joscelyn Roberson, the other alternate on Team USA and a member of the 2023 world championship team, will make her Arkansas debut this season. She will become the first member of the national team 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 represented the Philippines, as well as Canadians Cassie Lee (Iowa), Ava Stewart (Minnesota) and Aurelie Tran. (Iowa) and the Hungarian Csenge Bacskay (Georgia).
Return to glory in Athens?
It has 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 last at the SEC championships for the third straight year in March.
Following the 2024 NCAA championships, Georgia fired head coach Courtney Kupets Carter, who had led the team to four consecutive national championships during her time as a student-athlete at the school, after seven seasons on the job. Less than a week later, the school hired Canqueteau-Landi and Ryan Roberts as co-head coaches.
Canqueteau-Landi had been Biles' personal trainer since 2017 at the World Champions Center alongside her husband, Laurent Landi, and the news, just months before the Paris Olympics in which Biles was scheduled to compete, shocked the world of gymnastics. Canqueteau-Landi remained at the World Champions Center during the Olympic Games and then arrived in Athens in August.
Working with Roberts, who had been an assistant at Georgia for the past two seasons, the pair landed big-name transfers like Bacskay and former national team member Kara Eaker, and will have stars like the 2024 SEC Freshman of the Year, Lily Smith. Ady Wahl and Naya Howard are still on the roster. Roberts was excited about the team's future when he spoke to ESPN in November.
“One of our big goals is to go 24 of 24 in every meet,” Roberts said. “If we do that, we'll probably do pretty well and the results will come. Over 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 practice.” delivers, so execution is something we are focused on. We just keep it simple; “We can't control the scores, so all we can do is control our execution and try to get better every day.”
Georgia is ranked No. 14 in the preseason coaches' poll and begins competition Jan. 12 in a quad meet against Denver, Missouri and Long Island.
LSU looks to run it back
Entering last season, LSU had been runner-up for the NCAA title four times, but had never been able to claim the top spot on the podium.
But 2024 changed all.
Led all season by eventual NCAA all-around champion Haleigh Bryant, the Tigers bounced back during their final rotation at the team championship on beam with the highest collective score (49.7625) in the event's history for win the title. Bryant later told reporters that it was something he had wanted since he committed to the school, and the opportunity to repeat was so enticing that he announced he would return for a fifth year.
And this season, which begins with a banner ceremony before Friday's meet, looks like it could be more of the same. In addition to Bryant, the Tigers' roster is loaded with talent. Finnegan, who claimed the NCAA victory on beam in April and won the individual floor title, returns after 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 a torn Achilles tendon that derailed her Olympic dreams. 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 team and should make an immediate impact.
The school announced that it had broken its previous record with 8,680 tickets sold before this season. With that loud home crowd and roster depth that most coaches and teams could only dream of, LSU certainly has everything it needs to repeat this season.
Oklahoma's Year of Redemption
Of course, no team could want him more (and be more prepared to do it) 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 entire 2024 season ranked No. 1. But the team got off to a disastrously unusual start in its first rotation on vault in the semifinal, when Three gymnasts had major landing errors. The Sooners were in last place entering their second event and were never able to fully close the deficit, missing national championship competition for the first time since 2012.
The Sooners have a lot to prove this year and will likely use last year's heartbreak as motivation all season long. Led by reigning NCAA individual champions Audrey Davis (bars and beam) and Faith Torrez (beam) and 2024 Big 12 overall champion Jordan Bowers, Oklahoma will be an immediate force in its first year in the SEC and among the favorites. but he favorite, for the NCAA title in April.
Even the jumper, the device that caused the team's early exit in Texas, should be a very valuable weapon for the Sooners. There are nine gymnasts on the roster who can compete on a vault with a starting value of 10.0. With so much talent and plenty of grudge, the Sooners will be fun to watch this year as they seek a seventh national title.
Old faces, new places
In addition to Oklahoma making its SEC debut and the subsequent change in the conference 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 after the 2023-2024 academic year, it marked the end of regular meetings between historic rivals, and now some of the country's consistently top-ranked teams 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's equal parts confusing, geographically maddening, and disappointing for fans of the previous rivalries, and it will certainly be interesting to see how each team fares in their new conference.
If it's not strange enough that reigning Pac-12 champion Utah is now in the Big 12 and reigning Big 12 champion Oklahoma is now in the SEC, add this one to the list: reigning overall champion and Pac-12 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 after the season for unspecified reasons and is now in Florida.
The junior should be a key member of the star-studded, if not injury-plagued, Gators in 2025, along with Wong, Anya Pilgrim, Kayla DiCello, Riley McCusker and sisters Skye and Sloane Blakely. McCusker missed the 2024 season following ankle surgery and DiCello and Skye Blakeley tore their Achilles tendons in June while trying to make the U.S. Olympic team. DiCello underwent another surgery on her other foot in December and it is unclear how much either gymnast will be able to contribute this season.
