re: Remove

Opinions on how Florida is continuing to get such big name recruits? Seems like for the past few years the talk on here has been how Jenny hasn’t lived up to expectations or done enough with the talent she has. Sounds like they have another killer class coming in next year with Hurd and McCusker. What is it about UF that attracts them? We have such great facilities and fan support. I don’t know what other schools have, but I can’t imagine it’s any better. What’s the feeling about our coaching staff? Is there that possibility that young girls would rather go where there’s a youngish female coach, someone they can relate to a little better? I feel like everyone should be lining up to come to LSU!

Because Florida is a pretty attractive school for most athletics and even education. Most their sports don't have issues bringing in top talent. Jenny is a pretty good recruiter and she has a staff that all recruits very well. Some coaches are just special recruiters or have a staff that all recruits at a high level. Recruiting is a bit different in gymnastics than football where guys want to come here for like 2-3 years before bouncing to the NFL to become millionaires. Many of these girls also heavily weight academic options which has played a role in a few recruitments. There were a few girls LSU wanted pretty bad but they chose Stanford or UCLA because they liked the weight of those academic degrees, which is understandable.

DD has never been an "elite" recruiter. Jay is a great recruiter though.


OU has awful fan support and not great facilities but Kindler has been able to sell a message to usually get one or two "top" gymnasts on a team each season while being able to develop a great supporting cast to them. IMO they develop better than anyone else in the country right now. They don't have the flashy recruits as a whole like UCLA/Florida. They usually have couple elites with a big blend of level 10 kids. I honestly think they are the gold standard, you don't need a bunch of elites to be good. Issue with some of the elites is many of them are so beat up that they are limited to like one or two events.

IMO the biggest issue for LSU in recent years in recruiting is recruiting kids who have been injured for years before coming to LSU. It set many of them back in terms of their development. Many of the current gymnasts are pretty limited in terms of what they can do or actually compete.


Anyways, LSU's next two classes are absolutely loaded. We just signed the #1 recruiting class last year. Just got to get Kai, Alyona and Ryan healthy. There is a lot more to that class that has yet to be seen yet. Kiya has really been the only one healthy enough to truly give us a lot and its been a major impact.

Guess who qualified to NL Cup with Haleigh Bryant? Speaking of Bryant, she went over 39 in the AA which is insane.

That is awesome for Olivia. She's a beautiful gymnast. Looking forward to her class coming in next year to give us depth and a new look!


Utah just got a 49.6 on bars in their meet against UCLA.

Scoring in the Utah-UCLA meet was a complete joke!

Where does Olivia rank on incoming freshman gymnast ? I have seen her highlights and she looks unbelievable

I agree entirely with Tigerbait37's comment about recuiting.

Another factor that must be mentioned re: Florida, but also most other top gymnastics schools, is the extent to which existing team members affect future recruits. Someone picking a school is much more likely to go to a school at which they already have friends from club gym or elite. IMO that makes it easier for Florida to get more high level elites/national team members, since they all already knew each other for years from camps.

This is why the schools talk about developing links to certain gyms. So one reason why UCLA manages to get top Canadian elites is because those girls grew up watching Peng Peng Lee and following her career. They've grown up wanting to join UCLA since they were like 6. The same goes with LSU's recruiting - after McKenna, we would've gotten her sister, plus we then got two walk ons from the same gym (Lexie Nibbs and Maddie Rau). And we got Ruby through Lexie, since Ruby's gym used to come to train at Lexie's gym over the summer. Jay is definitely a great recruiter.

KJ is really great at picking gymnasts and developing them though. She gets a lot of L10s, and not even the star ones, and somehow turns them into weekly 9.9s. But part of this is also routine construction. They do only what difficulty is necessary, which they can hit well, and their gymnasts have practically no built-in deductions. On the other hand, they manage to maintain a lineup full of Y1.5s. They also manage their injuries well - Nichols and Smith are both definitely beat up, but have been managed well. Of course that is difficult to do if you don't have usable backups, which is the current LSU situation. Hopefully things will be significantly different next year when we get multiple strong AAers who aren't too beat up. Very glad Olivia Dunne and Annie Beard quit elite.

Haha! Well you can count on it being in there then. DD loves to put in the difficult leap series on all our girls even if they don't do them well.

Hopefully Selena Harris is LSU bound this summer!