The History of College Gymnastics – Part 1: Pre-NCAA

With college gymnastics reaching new heights season after season, there is no time like the present to look back and see how the sport we all know and love came to be. 

For our purposes, the story starts in 1969, when Springfield College won the first-ever championship of the newly created Division of Girls and Women’s Sports (DGWS). 

The 1968-69 Springfield College gymnastics team. (Photo courtesy of Springfield College, Archives and Special Collections.)

Although the apparatuses currently used in the sport had yet to fully evolve, even the earliest traces of college gymnastics contained elements familiar to a contemporary fan. On vault, the most common skill was a front handspring onto the table with no salto. While salto-less vaults have largely fallen out of favor, a handful of gymnasts still perform a handspring forward on, double twist off – most notably Ball State’s Arden Hudson, who competed the vault through the 2021 season. 

In the early days of college gymnastics (and gymnastics as a whole), the uneven bars were the apparatus modern fans would find the least familiar. Prior to the bars being moved apart in the ‘80s, the uneven bars were simply a pair of men’s parallel bars set to different heights. While single bar release skills were all but nonexistent and transitions were elementary, the apparatus already exhibited its characteristic fluidity. 

Over on beam, routines consisted of a combination of leaps, jumps, and non-flight acrobatic skills, like back walkovers and cartwheels. While many of the skills performed by gymnasts in this era have little impact on the modern iteration of the sport, one skill has carried through the ages: the wolf turn. In terms of dismounts, common options included a front aerial from the end of the beam and a back tuck from side position. 

Comparatively little footage of the floor exercise exists from this era, but the apparatus was referred to in Springfield College publications. 

A Springfield gymnast preps for a wolf turn. (Photo courtesy of Springfield College, Archives and Special Collections.)

Mimi Murray’s Springfield Pride was an early gymnastics powerhouse, winning three of the four DGWS championships. Other teams also attended the competition, including current NCAA programs Arizona State, Central Michigan, Centenary, Cornell, Sacramento State, and Southern Connecticut State. 

Even in its infancy, college gymnastics utilized the 10.0 scoring system, which is still used in the women’s collegiate version of the sport today. Champions were crowned through an average of scores in both prelims and finals, with teams typically paying $2.00 per competition entry or $8.00 for an all-around competitor. 

By 1973, however, a new league had arrived: the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). The AIAW championship, much like its NCAA successor, was split into three divisions. The inaugural Division I champion was the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, continuing a strong tradition of Massachusettsan gymnastics in the early days of the sport. 

It didn’t take long for the programs we know and love to rise to the upper echelons. Occasionally, Utah gymnastics will claim to hold 10 national championship titles, despite only winning nine at the NCAA level. The first Ute national championship actually came at the AIAW level in 1981. In one of the most impressive shows of longevity in the sport, Greg Marsden, the coach who guided Utah to its initial title, served as the Ute’s (or as they would be known past the 1992 season, the Red Rocks) head coach until 2015. 

The 1981 Utah gymnastics team. (Photo courtesy of the University of Utah, J. Willard Marriot Library.)

The inaugural Ute championship squad contained some familiar faces to current gymnastics fans, most notably Megan Marsden (née McCunniff) who, after marrying Greg, would go on to be a part of the Utah coaching squad up until 2019, climbing the ranks from assistant coach all the way to co-head coach alongside Tom Farden after her husband’s retirement.  

Utah wasn’t the only current blue blood program to trace its early successes to the AIAW period, however. One year after Utah won its first title, Florida won the team championship at the final AIAW championship. Unlike Utah, however, the advent of the NCAA championship later the same year led Florida to rarely, if ever, count its AIAW championship alongside its three NCAA titles. The inaugural Florida AIAW championship squad was led by Florida Athletics Hall of Fame inductee Lynn McDonnell, whose five All-American honors make her a compelling contender for the sport’s first collegiate star.

1982 served as the culmination of the pre-NCAA era, with the first NCAA Gymnastics Championships being hosted by reigning AIAW champions Utah in the Huntsman Center. Although the AIAW era was becoming a relic of the past, the sport was just getting started.