The long road to make the US a force in men’s gymnastics

In late July the five members of the United States men’s gymnastics team ended a 16-year medal drought when they clinched bronze in Paris. Asher Hong, Paul Juda, Brody Malone, Fred Richard, and Stephen Nedoroscik were instantly turned into fodder for everything from extensive dives into the sport to Superman memes. When the dust settled, it became clear that the team’s impact had also extended to a whole new slate of boys who had just discovered gymnastics, and were inspired to join their local gyms.

With any sudden interest in a sport comes the need for the infrastructure to accommodate it, and boys’ and men’s gymnastics in the US is no different. Luckily, there are coaches across the United States who are invested in doing exactly that, even if they have to build that infrastructure from the ground up.

James Jones is the type of person who sees a problem he can solve and steps in to do exactly that. When he started his boys’ gymnastics program in 2019, Jones didn’t have investors or financial backing from customers and families, but he had a goal: to give underserved boys in Atlanta a shot.

At the time Jones was a volunteer coach at a county-owned rec center that boasted a large girls’ gymnastics program, but had boys “doing gymnastics activities,” as he put it. The boys might run a relay race one day, or take leaps into a foam pit, “but they weren’t learning anything.”

So Jones approached the director and offered to take over the boys’ program and implement USA Gymnastics-approved lessons, skills, and levels progression. The director agreed, and Jones assumed the helm.

Related: Stephen Nedoroscik: USA’s bespectacled, Rubik’s Cube-solving gymnastics hero

This arrangement worked for everyone until it didn’t. Understandably, the rec center was more focused on offering a program that was fun and offered a broad appeal, and Jones wanted to build a program that would allow boys to learn the fundamentals of the sport and progress. When it became clear that the two visions were no longer aligned, Jones opened his own gym.

That gym is still thriving five years later, despite Covid-19, the fact that running a gym is hard work, and the expensive involved. Jones knows this well; the ceiling in his gym is low, which means more than once he has removed panels so boys can complete their skills. He also doesn’t have all the safety apparatus that he’d like, which means he often uses his own body to keep the kids safe.

“We don’t have a [foam] pit,” he explained. “We don’t have huge landing mats. And so it really is me under them, under every event and practice, trying to make sure I catch them if they fall.”

And fall they do. Jones gets hurt “a lot” he admitted, but there’s no other way – and that lack doesn’t stop his teams from getting results. In May, his gym produced the only all-Black boys gymnastics team to win gold when they took home top honors at the regional championships at level five. The road there was non-traditional, but Jones and what he calls his Skywalkers walked it anyway.

There’s also the problem of cost. Gymnastics is a privileged sport and a pricey one. Jones’s gym is self-funded, and when he opened up he had four mats – three purchased from Facebook Marketplace and one from Amazon – and one floor bar. “And I still had to produce a team that can compete with that level of equipment,” he said. “So for the first three years, it was really touch and go. Everything was on a shoestring budget.”

The community also pitched in. When a local gym closed they gave Jones their equipment, and more affluent families of gymnasts donated previously owned gear. Jones has made it work, piece by piece, skill by skill, boy by boy – but there’s still more to do.

A lot of his gymnasts never perform their entire routine for the first time until they get to competition, simply because they don’t have all the equipment they need in Jones’s gym. The gym itself is unique: it is inside a mall used by families running errands. “They’re walking through to get their groceries. They’re walking to do their laundry at the laundromat,” he said. “They see us, and a lot of people are just shocked. Like, blown away, you would never see or even think to see a gymnastics facility in our area or in our location.”

The gym often piques shoppers’ curiosity, and more than one family has come in to see what exactly is going on. Jones allows kids to try a class for free, sometimes a second, and even sometimes a third, so families can understand if the program’s three-day a week training schedule fits into their lives. He wants to retain kids, but he also wants as many boys as possible to be exposed to the sport because when he was growing up, there wasn’t a gym nearby.

Gains made by men’s programs in recent years

The fact that quality boys’ gymnastics programs are often tough to find isn’t unique to the house that Jones has built. The biggest stars in gymnastics, unlike a lot of sports, are female. That doesn’t mean young boys aren’t out there filling up classes like their female counterparts – but it does mean that retaining those boys as they age is a challenge.

Juda knows this well. Though there were as many as 20 boys in his early classes at the now-closed Buffalo Grove Gymnastics Center in the suburbs of Chicago, attendance dwindled over the years, and by the time he was ready for NCAA gymnastics that number had fallen to two.

Juda pinpointed high school as the point when most of his former teammates left the sport for good, something he chalked up to the typical pursuits of adolescence. “You get your [driving] license and all of a sudden, people are having parties on Fridays and that doesn’t necessarily align with a 6pm to 9pm practice on a Friday,” he said. “And then you’ve got Saturday early morning workouts, which … no one wants to do. You get a lot of temptations in high school.”

Malone had a similar experience. Once he got his driver’s license he drove himself to practice, an hour each way. The schedule wasn’t exactly one that many teenagers would enjoy: “I would leave school a little bit early, go home, eat lunch, and then go straight to gym, drive an hour, train for five hours, drive home, get back home at like 9.45, 10 o’clock at night, and then eat dinner and do whatever homework I could and then go to sleep,” he said.

The time spent was worth it, Malone said, because “it got me to where I am today.” But schedules like his raise the question: what if there were more gymnastics programs close to where high school athletes live? What if there were programs in their schools?

It turns out that the US used to have plenty of high school gymnastics programs for boys and girls all over the country, and this is something that USA Gymnastics is interested in bringing back. Jason Woodnick, USAG’s vice president of men’s gymnastics, sees high school as an avenue that could potentially even out the playing field in terms of accessibility for anyone interested in the sport.

Part of the risk involved is that most high school physical education teachers aren’t qualified at a competitive level, so schools would need coaches specifically for gymnastics, just as they do for baseball, football and basketball. The size and cost of the necessary equipment – and the extra money for qualified teachers – is also a barrier for often cash-strapped schools.

But the potential benefits, for students and the sport in general, are enormous. Getting the sport back into schools is “just a giant puzzle that we’re trying to figure out,” Woodnick said. “The discussion is there, and to me, that is our biggest barrier to popularity and to eyes on our sport – it’s got to be back in the school system.”

Looking ahead to Los Angeles 2028

So where does the sport in the US go from here? It would be foolish not to capitalize on the popularity and surge in enrollment that gyms across the country are experiencing, and it’s clear that people want to see boys’ and men’s gymnastics succeed.

Alex Pajor, president of the Illinois High School Gymnastics Coaches Association, is one of them. While it’s true that competitive gymnasts need specialist teachers, he says, a lot of the basics of the sports can be taught by coaches who specialize in other sports. And there’s already plenty of precedent.

For 20 years Harrison Bull coached the men’s gymnastics team at Hinsdale Central High School. His tenure at the head of the program included nine state championships, despite the fact that he started off as a football coach.

“That’s how most of the programs started,” Pajor said. He agrees that getting gymnastics back into high schools will be vital to its success in the US overall, and cites the fact that those teams often served as hubs of recruitment for athletes who continued the sport in college.

The future of US men’s gymnastics could also include longer professional careers for athletes who can keep performing as they near, or pass, 30. That’s part of what former Olympian Syque Caesar – now the coach of Malone and Nedoroscik – is working toward. “Typically, we’ve seen guys retire in their mid-20s,” he explained. “And they’re like, OK, you had a good career. That’s it. It was only their mid-20s. Like, there’s still more in the tank. And like, you have the infrastructure in place with medical and funding and stuff like that. You can prolong their career and hopefully make them even better.”

The difference for professional gymnasts in the United States, as opposed to many other countries, is that the programs aren’t funded by the government. This means American athletes have to train at an elite level while also making sure they have enough money for rent, groceries, and any other needs they have. In many other countries, by contrast, athletes are paid by the government and simply have to focus on gymnastics.

If there is one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that putting young children into gymnastics classes is where it all begins. Every Olympic dream was born in a gym where a young child felt safe enough to try a new skill on the parallel bars or a high school boy decided to specialize in one event. Building a love for the sport starts from the ground up, which is something that’s happening in gyms across the US, especially as more boys begin to ask their parents if they can try gymnastics, too.

And as for the Skywalkers training with Coach Jones in Atlanta? Despite what you might think, the name has little to do with the lightsaber-wielding family from a galaxy far, far away. When asked if the name is a reference, Jones laughed, and then clarified, “I am teaching boys to walk on the sky. That’s why we are the Skywalkers.”