Sam Appell-Waterman, 13, loves doing gymnastics. But he lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and twice in the three years that he’s been competing, the boys teams he has competed on have shut down.
So these days, his dad, Elijah Waterman, drives him about 90 minutes each way to a gym in Cedar Falls twice a week for Sam’s four-hour practices. Elijah says driving across eastern Iowa isn’t about getting Sam into the Olympics or anything – it’s just his sport. “You just want to let them do what they love to do, you know?” he says.
The family's experience is not uncommon. For boys who want to pursue gymnastics, it can be hard in many parts of the country to find a gym that has boys equipment and a boys coach. At the recent Iowa state meet, Waterman was disappointed to find just a handful of boys competing at Sam’s level and age group.
“Seeing those shrinking numbers, knowing our personal experience and the challenges that we’ve had to overcome to allow Sam to continue to compete, it just made us kind of sad for the sport as a whole, because it's a great sport,” he says.
With the Olympics in Paris underway, gymnastics once more has its quadrennial moment in the sun. Seeing the world’s best gymnasts flipping and soaring across the television screen tends to spur interest among kids to try the sport, and gyms typically see a spike in enrollment after the Olympics.
But gymnastics is often viewed as a more typically girls’ sport in the U.S., a perception that is self-fulfilling. More girls tend to show up to take gymnastics classes, and so gyms invest in the equipment on which girls and women compete: floor, vault, uneven bars, and balance beam.
The men compete on the same vault and floor, as well as four events of their own: rings, parallel bars, high bar, and pommel horse. To offer a boys gymnastics program, a gym's owners must invest in those apparatus and make space for them.
And they must find a coach who knows – or is willing to learn – how to coach the events that make up boys gymnastics.
“It's sort of a snake eating its tail kind of thing,” says Mike Walker, who coaches at a gymnastics club in Gainesville, Fla. “You don't have enough boys in many places. And then when you do have enough boys, you have a devil of a time getting coaches that know how to coach it. You have to find former male gymnasts, or you have to specifically cross-train your female coaches to know how to coach it.”
Walker also coaches other sports, including basketball. “If you can coach high school boys basketball, you dang sure can coach girls basketball too,” he says. “The rules differ in a few places, but it's nowhere near this chasm you see in gymnastics.”
The gender imbalance in the sport has widened in the last decade. In 2014, 15,000 boys competed in gymnastics in the U.S., while 90,000 girls did. In the 2023-24 season, 12,000 boys competed, compared to 138,000 girls. (These numbers include only USA Gymnastics-affiliated artistic gymnastics programs.)
Building up a boys team, and finding success
All these factors can dissuade gym owners from establishing – or continuing – a boys gymnastics team.
But in Arlington, Va., a relatively new boys program is growing and finding success. The Arlington County Parks and Recreation department had long offered coed recreational classes and a girls’ team. Then in 2009, some of the boys asked their instructor why they didn’t have a team.
“Six boys in particular said, 'Hey, why don't we have this team opportunity? Why don't we get to do all the fun things? Why don't we have fun uniforms?' ” remembers Sonja Hird Clark, who manages the county's gymnastics team program.
So Hird Clark checked out a boys meet and decided to make it happen. “We went to our first meet, the boys all qualified for the state championship, and that's where we began,” she says.
Fifteen years later, the Arlington Tigers, as the boys team is known, are thriving. They have their own gym space, and the program has added higher levels as the gymnasts master harder skills. Now they’re winning, too: in April, the Level 7 boys took first place at the Eastern National Championships.
Boys teams can be fragile, often relying largely on one coach. If that coach gets a different job, retires, or moves away, that can mean the swift shuttering of a program.
Mario Gorosito coaches the upper-level boys on the Tigers, after a career competing on Argentina’s national team. He says young athletes are drawn to the sport because it makes you feel like you can fly, and because it provides continuous challenge.
He has experienced the tough business of boys gymnastics: twice he has been coaching at gyms that opted to close their boys program, but kept the girls’ team running.
“It saddens me … seeing boys programs shutting down,” he says. “You don't know if you're going to find a job in the location that you are, and then maybe you have to move. So it's pretty tough." It also reduces the competition, he notes.
The pandemic was hard on gymnastics clubs, says Jason Woodnick, vice president for the men's program at USA Gymnastics.
“I don't believe it is a normal thing for gyms to just shut down out of the blue. I think we're just still seeing … the effect of maybe business never got back up to where it was pre-COVID,” he says.
Some of the newest members of the Arlington Tigers are boys from two other gyms in Northern Virginia that recently closed. Hobie Biliouris, 14, is one of them. The gym where he’d trained for six years closed its boys program when the head coach moved away.
When NPR visited the Tigers in early July, it was just his second day with his new team. “It’s different, but I like it,” Biliouris says.
Biliouris says it felt “horrible” when his team shuttered, “because I didn’t know what I was going to do after that.” Most of the other boys found spots at gyms in the area, he says, but two stopped doing gymnastics because they couldn’t find a spot.
Hird Clark rattles off four local clubs that shut down their boys teams since the start of the pandemic – primarily, she says, from a lack of coaches. When a team closes down, she’ll get calls from parents looking for a spot for their sons – but there’s not enough capacity for the Tigers to take them all.
Shrinking opportunities at the top
Evan Virtue, 17, competes at Level 10 for the Tigers, and has done gymnastics since he was three. He hopes to compete for West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. If he does, he’ll be on just one of few remaining NCAA men’s gymnastics programs in the country.
College teams have long been the training grounds for the U.S. men’s Olympic team, but following a huge decline over the decades, today there there are just 15 men's programs in the NCAA.
“It's terrible -- a lot of them are shutting down,” Virtue says. "The spots are really limited. So it's really just the best of the best get to go.”
Woodnick at USA Gymnastics says in other parts of the world, men’s gymnastics is more popular than women's, and it gets more funding. "It's a completely different culture, a different way of life …. There's just more buy-in in Europe and in Asia,” he says, adding that in some Asian countries, gymnastics is part of the scholastic program in schools, even at the elite level.
USA Gymnastics is trying to make it easier for more boys to try the sport. A few years ago, it launched the Club Track (along with a similar program called Xcel on the girls’ side) in which boys can compete on a team, but with fewer hours of training. It lessens the coaching burden, too.
“You may only need someone to coach that program once or twice a week,' says Woodnick. "It allows kids to do competitive gymnastics, but also do plenty of other activities that they may want to do."
Salvatore Arcuri, who started the boys team at Aeon Fitness and Gymnastics in Hillsdale, N.J., believes many of the barriers to starting a program can be overcome with a little resourcefulness. With little prior experience with the men’s sport, Arcuri attended trainings offered by USA Gymnastics, and found more resources on Instagram and YouTube.
And the equipment doesn't need to be brand new, he says: “I've been to competitions where we have competed on equipment that's 20 years old and it works perfectly fine.”
In Paris, the U.S. men’s team will be angling for the spotlight
The fact that boys gymnastics teams are often few and far between has a real effect on sport's talent pipeline, all the way to the Olympics.
“We are absolutely missing talented boys that are out there that that could do gymnastics probably at a very high level,” says Woodnick. “It’s tough. There is no easy fix."
Still, this could be a break-out Olympics for the U.S. men, who captured the team bronze at the world championships last year. Woodnick says the squad going to Paris has the potential to medal as a team and individually, which could drive more boys in the U.S. to try to the sport. And some of the top U.S. men, especially star Frederick Richard, have attracted new fans via TikTok videos that meld feats with fun.
Asher Hong, who competes for Stanford University, is one of those headed to Paris on the U.S. team. Along his own path to the Olympics, he recalls the year his family moved to central Missouri, and were lucky to find a boys team where the budding gymnast could keep learning.
Now, Hong wishes boys had more opportunities to compete – in the NCAA and with local clubs.
“It's a great sport and it's something that I hope that every little guy wants to do,” he told NPR after being named to Olympic team last month. “Instead of it being always basketball or football or baseball, I want them to be like, ‘Oh, I want to be I want to be a men's gymnast,’ because that's what the scenario is in a lot of other countries. And if we can get that to start in the U.S., then I think that we can be just as good as China, Japan and Russia.”
Copyright 2024 NPR
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