How will Olympians Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles fare? Will Cecile Canqueteau-Landi — best known as Simone Biles’ longtime coach — be able to turn things around in Georgia? Can LSU repeat? Will Oklahoma be saved? And what about all those conference changes?
The season opens Friday night with exciting matchups between Iowa State at No. 2 LSU (7:30 p.m. ET on the SEC Network) and Utah State at No. 5 at Utah (9 p.m. ET on ESPN+). Several other top-ranked teams compete in various invitational meets over the weekend: No. 4 California, No. 10 UCLA and No. 19 Oregon State headline Saturday’s contest in Oceanside, Calif., and No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 17. Auburn is part of an invitational that same day in Nashville, Tennessee. No. 12 Denver and No. 13 Michigan close out the weekend with a dual meet on Sunday (5 p.m. on ESPN2).
But of course, this is just the first weekend. The season will get more exciting — and more at stake — as it continues, culminating in the crowning of a new champion on April 19 in Fort Worth, Texas. Here’s the gymnasts, the teams and everything you need to know heading into the new year.
The Golden Girls
After helping the U.S. squad win Olympic team gold in Paris this summer, Carey (Oregon State) and Chiles (UCLA) are back for their respective teams and looking to collect more team and individual hardware. are
Carey, who also earned an Olympic bronze medal on vault, stayed with the Beavers during the lead-up to Paris and is now back in Corvallis for her senior year. He performed with the “Gold Over America” tour during the fall, so the 24-year-old had minimal time off after the Olympics. But she was the NCAA all-around and floor runner-up last season, even shaking up the elite and collegiate, and will be a threat throughout this season.
Chile, which was controversially stripped of its bronze medal in Paris. It is embroiled in a legal battle to get it back.Last year the focus was only on elites. But she’s back at Westwood for her junior season alongside the GOAT Tour. The 23-year-old is a two-time NCAA champion after winning the 2023 titles on floor and bars, and returned the Bruins to their former glory as a seven-time national champion, after a few subpar years by UCLA’s standards. Will try to bring. .
Lian Wong, a four-time medalist at the world championships And the US team alternate in Paris, has also returned to Florida for her senior season. She was co-champion on the uneven bars at the 2024 NCAA Championships and helped the Gators, ranked No. 3 in the preseason poll, to runner-up finishes in 2022 and 2023.
Joscelyn Roberson, Team USA’s second alternate and a member of the 2023 World Championship team, will make her Arkansas debut 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).
A return to glory in Athens?
It’s been a rough 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.
After the 2024 NCAA Championships, Georgia fires head coach Courtney Coppets Carter — who after seven seasons in that role — led the team to four straight national championships during her time as a student-athlete at the school. Less than a week later, Rented school Canqueteau-Landi and Ryan Roberts as co-head coaches.
Canqueteau-Landi had been Biles’ personal coach at the World Champions Center with her husband, Laurent Landi, since 2017, and the news — just months before the Paris Olympics in which Biles was scheduled to compete — sent shockwaves through the gymnastics world. Canqueteau-Landi stayed at the World Champions Center through the Olympics and then arrived in Athens in August.
Working with Roberts, who was an assistant at Georgia for the past two seasons, the duo brought in big-name transfers like Beckske and former national team member Kara Acker, and stars like 2024 SEC Freshman of the Year Lily Smith. Gaye, Eddie Wahl and Nia Howard are still on the roster. Speaking to ESPN in November, Roberts was upbeat about the team’s future.
“One of our big goals is to go 24-for-24 every meet,” Roberts said. “If we do that, we’re probably going to do very well and the results will come. We’ve been good in practice over the last few years but we haven’t been able to execute quite the way we need to. It’s done, because we’re focused on it, we can’t just control the score, so we can just control our process and try to improve every single day.”
Georgia is ranked No. 14 in the preseason coaches poll and opens Jan. 12 in a quad meet against Denver, Missouri and Long Island.
LSU wants to run him back.
Entering last season, LSU had been the NCAA title runner-up on four occasions but had never been able to top the podium.
But 2024 changed. everything
Led by NCAA all-around champion Haleigh Bryant throughout the season, the Tigers rebounded during their final rotation at the team championships on beam with the highest collective score in event history (49.7625) to win the title. Bryant later told reporters that it had been something since she committed to the school — and the chance to repeat was so appealing that she announced she was returning for a fifth year.
And this season, which opens with a banner ceremony before the meet on Friday, looks like it could be something more. Aside from Bryant, the Tigers’ roster is absolutely loaded with talent. Finnegan, who won the NCAA beam and individual floor title in April, bounced back from her Olympic debut in her senior season.
There’s also sophomore Connor McClain, who won the SEC beam title his freshman season and is coming off an Achilles tear that derailed his Olympic dreams. Fellow reigning SEC champions KJ Johnson (floor) and Ashley Cowan (bars) also return, as do top scorers Sierra Ballard, Amari Drayton and Olivia Dunne.
Not to mention, national team members Kalia Lincoln, Zoe Miller and Lexi Zeiss are all new to the squad, and should make an immediate impact.
The school announced that it broke its previous record with 8,680 season tickets earlier this season. With a great home crowd and roster depth most coaches and teams can only dream of, LSU certainly has everything it needs to repeat this season.
Oklahoma’s Redemption Year
Of course, no team would want that more — and be more willing to do it — than the Oklahoma Sooners.
The two-time defending national champions were 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 unspectacular start in their first rotation on the vault in the semifinals, when three gymnasts made critical landing mistakes. The Sooners finished last in their second event and were never able to fully make up the deficit, missing out on the national championship meet 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 throughout the season. Led by individual NCAA champions Audrey Davis (bars and beam) and Faith Torres (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 favorites. gave The favorite — for the NCAA title come April.
Even Walt, the apparatus that led to the team’s early exit in Texas, should be an extremely valuable weapon for the Sooners. There are nine gymnasts on the roster who can compete on vault with a starting value of 10.0. With so much talent and a big chip on their shoulders, the Sooners 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 the resulting change to the conference’s championship format From a one-day event to a two-day eventmany teams will be in new conferences this year. Since the Pac-12 largely disbanded after the 2023-2024 school year, it marked the end of regular meetings between the storied rivals, and now some new chapters among the consistently top-ranked teams in the nation. are starting
While Oregon State and Washington State remain in a 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 has joined the Big 12. It’s equal parts confusing, geographically insane and frustrating. Fans of past rivalries, and it will undoubtedly be interesting to see how each team fares in their 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 to the list: 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, Dismissed from UCLA. After the season for unspecified reasons and is now in Florida.
The junior should be a key member of a star-studded Gators lineup in 2025 — along with Wong, Anya Pilgrim, Kayla DiCello, Riley McCusker and sisters Skye and Sloane Blakely — if not plagued by injury. McCusker missed the 2024 season after ankle surgery, and DiCello and Skye Blakeley both ruptured their Achilles tendons trying to make the U.S. Olympic team in June. Decillo had another surgery on her other foot in December, and it’s unclear how much the gymnast will be able to contribute this season.