After a thrilling season, full of dynamic performances and often stunning results, the 2025 NCAA gymnastics championships are finally upon us and just eight teams remain in contention for the ultimate crown.
Competing in Fort Worth, Texas, at Dickies Arena, Oklahoma, Florida, Missouri and Alabama will kick off the action in Thursday’s first semifinal (4:30 p.m. ET on ESPN2) while LSU, Utah, UCLA and Michigan State will compete in the evening session (9 p.m. ET on ESPN2). The top two teams from each semifinal will advance to Saturday’s team final (4 p.m. ET on ABC), and individual winners will be named Thursday following the second semifinal.
According to ESPN analyst and 2015 NCAA all-around champion Samantha Peszek, this will be a weekend to remember.
“I think this is one of the tightest fields in a really long time, maybe ever,” Peszek said Friday. “I think all eight of these teams are extremely competitive and have shown moments of greatness this year that could contend with any team in the country.”
So for now, we’re left with countless questions about how the competition will play out. Can LSU successfully defend its title to go back-to-back? Will Oklahoma reclaim the trophy after a shocking upset at the event in 2024? Can Florida, Utah or UCLA, or any of the other teams, surprise and capture glory? And who will seize the year’s top individual honor in the all-around competition? Here’s everything you need to know going into the final weekend of the college gymnastics season.
The defending champs
This time a year ago, LSU had been the NCAA runner-up on four occasions but had never secured the podium’s top spot.
But of course, everything changed last April. The Tigers capitalized on a wildly successful season and managed to capture their first national championship, behind the heroics of all-around winner Haleigh Bryant, and a triumphant final rotation on beam, in which the team earned the highest collective score (49.7625) in the history of the event.
The victory inspired Bryant to come back for a fifth year, and there is perhaps no team more loaded with talent on its roster than LSU. That depth has been shown throughout the course of the season. Led by Bryant, Aleah Finnegan and Konnor McClain, and freshman phenom Kailin Chio, the team ended the regular season ranked No. 1 overall and on vault, and in the top five on the other events. LSU has lost just twice this season — finishing in second behind Oklahoma at the Sprouts Farmers Market Collegiate Quad during the second week and to Arkansas on the road two weeks later — but hasn’t been defeated since Jan. 24 and has shown little weakness since.
At last month’s SEC championships, which included Oklahoma for the first time, LSU earned its highest-ever score at the event with a 198.200, and earned the conference title for the sixth time. Earlier this month, the Tigers won the Pennsylvania regional, and their 198.050 was the second-highest score across all regional competition. The team seems more than capable of running it back.
In January, head coach Jay Clark said the team’s goals for the year were to win the SEC and NCAA titles, but was pragmatic in his approach and expectations.
“We state [our goals] early and then we don’t talk about ’em again,” Clark told ESPN. “We put our head down and go to work and just try to knock it out one step at a time. We recognize the small goals along the way a whole lot more than we do focusing on some end result that if that becomes your entire existence, you wind up disappointed more times than not.
“Of course, we want to win again. Will it be this year? I don’t know. We just keep working at it.”
Redemption mission
No team has come closer to “dynasty” status in the past decade than Oklahoma. The Sooners arrived in Fort Worth last year as the two-time reigning champions, looking ready to achieve the three-peat.
Everyone knows what happened next. During the team’s opening rotation on vault during the semifinals, Oklahoma had three gymnasts suffer major landing errors, and the team was firmly in fourth place heading to their second event. Despite a valiant effort the rest of the meet, the Sooners were unable to close the deficit and handed their earliest exit since 2012.
But that was then.
Since that shocking result, the Sooners have embraced their “underdog” status (to be clear, those are their words and perhaps no one else’s) and find motivation in what happened. It’s worked.
Led by Jordan Bowers and Faith Torrez, as well as fifth-year graduate student Audrey Davis, the team has been dominant throughout the season. Oklahoma didn’t win the title at the SEC championships, instead finishing second, and lost in a marquee regular season matchup with LSU. But the team won everything else, and that’s not hyperbole.
The Sooners’ 198.450 score won them the Washington regional final, and was the top score across all regions. And Bowers earned three perfect 10.0 scores (on vault, bars and floor) during that competition. Oklahoma enters the NCAA championships with the highest season average score (197.908) in the country, and was ranked first for much of the season.
As the Sooners learned last year, anything is possible in Fort Worth. But head coach K.J. Kindler told ESPN after the team’s first meet that she believed last year’s result would only help them this season.
“We own what happened, we’re accountable for what happened. We made a mistake. Oh my gosh, we’re humans. It’s a tough time to make a mistake but it happened. Ignoring it would be silly because the rest of the country isn’t ignoring it, so we’re not compartmentalizing it, we’re using it to make us better.”
The other contenders
LSU and Oklahoma are the favorites for the title, but there are certainly a few other teams who have what it takes to hoist the trophy on Saturday.
After a strong season, which included victories over fellow Elite Eight teams Utah, Michigan State, Missouri and Alabama, No. 3 Florida narrowly won — by 0.025 of a point! — its regional final for the 22nd time in program history. With Leanne Wong and Selena Harris-Miranda both ranked in the top five nationally in the all-around, the Gators will be looking to advance to Saturday’s “Four on the Floor” for the fifth straight year and win their fourth NCAA title and first since 2015.
According to ESPN analyst John Roethlisberger, who won the men’s NCAA all-around title three times during his collegiate career, they have what it takes to do it. He said Florida was in the “top tier” entering the competition, alongside LSU and Oklahoma, but did add a caveat.
“Florida might have the highest ceiling of any team in the NCAA championships,” Roethlisberger said. “But they’ve also had some fluctuations. They went to bars at SEC championships and put up a NCAA record score and then they go to beam and they had, for their standards — a lot of other teams across the country might love their beam — but for them it was a big step back and they ended up third.”
Similar possibilities could be said for Utah, a nine-time NCAA team champion, competing in its 49th(!) consecutive national championship. The Red Rocks are ranked No. 4 entering Thursday and are coming off an incredible debut season in the Big 12, having won both the regular season and championship titles. Buoyed by 2020 Olympic silver medalist Grace McCallum, now a senior and the reigning Big 12 champion in the all-around and on vault, Utah hasn’t lost a meet since falling to Florida on Feb. 2. Could this finally be the year the Red Rocks end the drought and win their first NCAA championship since 1995?
UCLA, Utah’s former Pac-12 conference rival, was equally successful in its first year in the Big Ten. After a lackluster start to the season, the No. 6-ranked Bruins swept through conference competition, winning the regular season and clinching the conference championship with a Big Ten-record 198.450 score. That performance was indicative of just how good the team can be when at its best. Chae Campbell won the all-around title and Jordan Chiles (floor), Brooklyn Moors (floor) and Ciena Alipio (beam) all earned perfect 10.0s during the competition. Competing in the Utah region, UCLA finished just two-tenths of a point behind first-place Utah in the regional final. The Bruins will now look to advance to Saturday’s championship for the first time since 2019 — and then win their eighth NCAA title and first since 2018.
And don’t count out No. 5 Michigan State, No. 7 Missouri and No. 8 Alabama. All three teams have made it this far for a reason. Roethlisberger said that the Spartans would be a trendy betting pick.
“If anybody’s going to take a long shot in the country, if we could go to a sports book in Vegas for gymnastics, I think a lot of people would want to put money on Michigan State,” Roethlisberger said. “You’re going to get great odds and they have just this fire and this panache that a lot of other teams don’t have.”
Individual honors
One of the most interesting aspects of the NCAA championships is the inclusion of individual qualifiers — the top all-around competitor and top finisher on each event from each regional who are not part of a competing team. These gymnasts become almost temporary members of teams, as they rotate during the semifinal competition with their new squad. Some notable pairings this week include Oregon State’s Jade Carey with LSU and Arkansas’ Joscelyn Roberson with Utah. Oklahoma called Denver’s Madison Ulrich, who will be rotating with the Sooners, an “extra special bonus teammate” in a social media post.
Those individuals have their eyes set on some shiny new hardware, too. Carey, a senior and three-time Olympic medalist, has had a historic season. Ranked No. 1 in the nation in the all-around and on beam, Carey has won the all-around title at every meet this season, including during Oregon State’s fourth-place finish at regional finals. A four-time NCAA runner-up, including in the all-around last season, Carey will be looking to conclude her decorated collegiate career with the ultimate individual title.
The 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭 routine for a Meet Week Monday.#MWM x #GoBeavs pic.twitter.com/PAk2hrIyua
— Oregon State Gymnastics (@BeaverGym) April 1, 2025
Roberson, an alternate on the U.S. Olympic team in Paris, has also had a standout freshman season for the Razorbacks and could make an impression in her NCAA championships debut.
“It’s been really fun to watch Joscelyn just embrace the college gymnastics world,” ESPN analyst and six-time Olympic medalist Aly Raisman said last week. “And also she’s a phenomenal competitor and [I’m] really excited to see how she does in her first national championship.”
While Carey is the favorite for the all-around crown because of her season-long results, LSU’s Bryant could repeat, and her teammate Chio could also close out her brilliant freshman season in a big way. Oklahoma’s Bowers and Torrez could both contend, as could Florida’s Wong and Harris-Miranda, Utah’s McCallum or UCLA’s Campbell or Chiles. One thing is for certain: Thursday’s star-studded meets will be an epic battle between some of the sport’s best and brightest.
