Stephen Nedoroscik, coaches weigh in on changes aimed to save men’s college gymnastics
Critics of men’s gymnastics, particularly at the college level, have characterized the sport as hard to follow and boring, especially compared to its female counterpart, with its perfect 10s and seemingly ever-growing hype.
While the dull nature of the sport is up to interpretation, one thing is for sure: the number of men’s college gymnastics programs is plummeting.
As recently as the late 60s, there were over 200 programs for prospective college gymnasts to choose from. Today, there are only 15 NCAA-sanctioned programs left, and only nine of those programs offer scholarships.
Facing extinction, the NCAA has introduced a new competition format starting in the 2024-25 season: four up, four count, which translates to four athletes competing with all four scores counting toward the team total. NCAA men’s gymnastics competitions have gone through various format changes in recent years. At one point, they were six up, five count through February and then five up, five count through the end of the season. Then they went to five up, five count through the whole season.
NCAA women’s gymnastics uses the six up, five count format all season long. Although that system has proven popular on the women’s side of the sport, it was largely incompatible with the scoring system used in NCAA men’s gymnastics, which mirrors the two-part difficulty and execution score model used at the elite level. Unlike in women’s college gymnastics, where everyone is generally on a level playing field, usually starting from a 10.0 on bars, beam, and floor, the use of difficulty scores in men’s competition gave teams a sense of which gymnast’s score they would be dropping before the meet even started. And when it came time for all five routines to count, it created more separation between the top teams and the rest of the country.
For Oklahoma head coach Mark Williams, who voted for the proposal despite personal reservations, the goal of this new policy is straightforward: preservation of the sport at the college level.
“We were told from at least one of the struggling programs that it might make a difference if they were traveling less numbers,” Williams said.
When Minnesota discontinued its program in 2020, it became evident that the following few years would be vital for the survival of the sport. If Minnesota could cut its team, which was the runner-up just two seasons prior in 2018, everyone was in danger.
Only two months prior to the news of Minnesota cutting its successful program, the Big Ten lost another men’s gymnastics member – the Iowa Hawkeyes. Former Hawkeyes head coach JD Reive, now the head coach at Army, has a personal connection to the sport’s preservation, but he’s apprehensive to think that this proposal could be the start of a new era.
“While [the changes] do have an impact on budgeting and finances, I’m not a firm believer that it really has an impact on saving the sport,” explained Reive.
Reive, along with Williams, cites diminishing parity in men’s gymnastics as a potential repercussion of the new format, which combined with new, NCAA-wide roster limits, would give larger athletic departments the ability to fund up to 20 scholarships to fill a total of 24 lineup spots, a luxury simply unaffordable for many of the sport’s smaller programs.
Although Army, along with the sport’s six other non-scholarship programs, would not be beholden to new roster limits, the inevitable bump in recruiting that increased scholarship opportunities would cause at top programs is impossible to ignore.
Opinions are not all negative regarding the proposal, however. Last summer’s Paris Olympic Games placed increased attention on men’s gymnastics – a trend that those at the top of the sport are hoping will carry down to the college level.
No male gymnast is as famous in American public culture right now as Stephen Nedoroscik, who went viral during the Paris Games after being dubbed the “Pommel Horse Guy.” Nedoroscik, himself a product of the NCAA system, having attended Penn State from 2017 to 2020, highlighted a potential benefit of the new competition format as it pertains to preparing college athletes for elite competition.
“I always think of dealing with pressure like a muscle that needs to be exercised, and this new format will definitely do that,” stated Nedoroscik.
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Reive, who has been on both sides of the elite system as an athlete and a member of team selection committees, agrees: “Olympians will tell you that at the highest levels… they learned how to hone [their abilities] in NCAA competition.”
World and Olympic team finals are three up, three count. With the new competition format getting rid of a counted score, NCAA competitions will begin to look even more like their elite counterparts, perhaps providing increased preparation for athletes at the programs that produced every member of the American Paris Olympic men’s gymnastics delegation.
Alongside the potential impacts on the NCAA to elite pipeline, the other eventual end goal of the new regulations is growth. Simpson and Greenville both added programs in the last few years, helping to mend the losses of Big Ten programs like Iowa and Minnesota. Ideally, the switch to four up, four count would make men’s gymnastics more TV-friendly, with shorter meets primed for TV time slots, eventually translating to growth in the sport, both in terms of individual athletes and new programs.
Nedoroscik, who is no stranger to television after finishing fourth on Season 33 of Dancing with the Stars, believes “a more TV-friendly meet format opens the doors to more media and publicity opportunities within the NCAA.”
Men’s gymnastics boasts a unique storm of high retention rates and impressive academic success. As Reive puts it, “These are kids that have been super disciplined from the time they were five.” Men’s gymnastics has proven itself to be a discipline worth protecting, which highlights the two-fold goals of new roster limits and four up, four count – preservation first, growth second.
